Applying English Songs To Improving Senior Middle School Students' English Listening Comprehension

Listening comprehension has long been one of the neglected areas abroad and at home.Although many researchers advocate more attention to listening comprehension,it remains one of the least understood processes and continues to be underrated in the teaching practice.It has long labeled as a passive skill.Traditional teaching approach has dominated listening class.Under this situation,students are exposed to the succession of listening texts on a cassette tape,and then are given tests to examine how much they have understood in terms of a lot of comprehension exercises rather than being taught how to listen and how to cope with their listening problems in class.FL listeners are even called "tape-recorders".This could make students unmotivated and bored and they are not "stirred up" to take the initiative in the listening activities.Such a perspective of listening fails to account for the interpretation the students make as they hear the incoming input according to their expectations,owning to the lack of background knowledge.Over a long period of time,English listening teaching in senior middle school has proved to be an occasion on which teachers provide students with much listening material.Listening is not being taught but tested,and it is involved in intensive English teaching instead of in listening class. In China,listening comprehension(LC) is a relatively new requirement in high school English teaching.Although its importance has been widely recognized and targeted goals have been clearly defined,the effective teaching and learning of LC in high school remains problematic.This thesis explores a new approach that can enhance listening comprehension learning and teaching in high school.Its main assumption is that a much better result can be achieved by employing English songs in listening that are suitable for high school students.It is the central goal of this exploratory study to test this approach.With a designed classroom experiment,the study sheds lights on how effective English songs can be arranged and trained in a high school context.Through designed training,this study has found English songs can be incorporated into high school English listening and the effectiveness is the following:1.The students' interest in English have been improved through the one-year experiment.2.The students' listening comprehension has been improved.