Learning Difficulties In English Listening Of Senior High School Students: Analysis And Strategies

Listening, as one of the four basic language skills, cannot be ignored in language learning. However, in some areas in China, listening is the least satisfactory item for most of the students. Therefore, the author of this study deliberated upon this phenomenon and carries out a series of investigations, from which it has been found that the actual listening level of the students is still not up to the requirements of the New English Curriculum Standards. The gap between the actual teaching of listening and the strong desire of the teachers and students who are eager to improve the listening skills is very remarkable. There are all kinds of difficulties. This paper has been written as a way to address the difficulties so as to enhance the effectiveness of the teaching of listening skills.The paper includes five parts. Part I provides the research background, followed by a discussion of the purpose and significance of the current study. Part II reviews the previous literature on the teaching of listening skills. It then focuses on the empirical research on listening difficulties, and notes the limitations of studies of the current senior high school English listening.Part III classifies the difficulties of the senior high school English listening. First, intensive interviews were carried out with some teachers who are from No.2 Senior High School and No.3 Senior High School in Pingdingshan in order to explore the difficulties in listening teaching. Then, based on the results of the interviews, a questionnaire was designed for a survey among 354 high school students in another three high schools which generated the important data for the discovery of the main difficulties of listening. The solutions to overcome the difficulties then are reported in Part IV.Part V mainly introduces a teaching experiment, which was conducted based on the study of listening problems and solutions. It analyses the data before and after the experiment, and testifies that the listening ability of the students can be improved under the listening teaching guided by the relevant theories. In Part VI, the author summarizes the findings and presents the implications, and makes several suggestions for improving the teaching of listening to high school students. Finally, the paper concludes by pointing out some limitations of the study and the direction of further research.