A Survey Of English Listening Teaching In Rural Junior Middle School

Listening is wisely regarded as the most important among the four basic skills (Listening, speaking, reading and writing) in English teaching and learning. The level of listening is an effective indication of one’s language ability in communication and practice, and it is also an important process as the basic premise of and main approach to improving English ability as a whole. With the deepening of the new course reform, the requirement of the listening and speaking ability is also rising. Meanwhile, the junior middle school stage is the key period for the development of students’ English ability, so developing listening skills is an important goal of junior middle school English. However, in the vast rural middle school, English listening has been a weak area of English teaching and learning, and the students’ listening level is generally low. Their passive study habits, traditional teaching methods and test-based training have seriously hindered the improvement of the students’ English listening ability. Therefore, it is very necessary to investigate the situation of English listening in the rural junior middle school, find the crucial reasons of the problem, and provide countermeasures to the problem.This study is based on the theory of second language acquisition and the basic concepts related of effective English listening. By applying the information processing mode of listening comprehension advanced by Adams Anderson&Durkin (1978), a systematic investigation is conducted in junior middle school English listening teaching and learning. The study lasts for half a year, with60teachers and600fourth year students from three rural middle schools of Boshan, Zibo. By the process of case interview, questionnaire investigation, and data collection, the author analyses the survey data by using Excel software. The focus of the study is to find the existing problems concerning both the students and teachers in the listening process. The research findings are as follows:From the perspective of the students, their learning attitude is not correct, their interest in learning is not great, they lack confidence in the process, and they go through a lot of anxiety. For the teachers, they do not pay due attention to listening, they do not take to trouble to find enough teaching resources, their teaching is not flexible enough, and fail to provide their students with proper guidance, etc. In addition, the writer puts forward some countermeasures for the improvement of English listening in rural junior middle school, including creating good learning environment, enhancing the students’listening interest, developing good listening habits, training basic listening skills.There are some flaws with the study, such as the short research period, the limited scope of the study, the researcher’s lack of experience, but the anticipative goal is achieved. From a very practical point of view, and with detailed data analysis of the current rural junior middle school English listening, the study proposed some strategies, which has a certain reference value for later studies.