The Influence Of English Listening Comprehension Materials Selection On Senior High School Students’Listening Competence

Selecting listening materials is the primary step for practicing listening. Many teachers and researchers believe that different kinds of real life materials help to inspire students’interest and improve their listening competence, while investigations of the high school English listening teaching show that many high school teachers still teach listening in the traditional way. The teachers play the recorder to make the students do exercises. Most of the teachers and researchers get the conclusion theoretically, i.e. abundant real life listening materials is more helpful in improving high school students’listening competence than the traditional recorded testing paper materials, but not through practical experiment. Questionnaire investigation and paper testing methods are employed in this research. The targets are61senior high school students from Jingxing No.1High School, in Shijiazhuang City, Hebei Province. The quantitative data is analyzed with the help of SPSS10.0and is summarized with a series of figures and tables. The results of this study show that:(1) Listening practicing materials selection does have an influence on senior high school students’listening scores in college entrance examination. To be exactly, students’scores differ when they are given different kinds of listening practicing materials. When the students are attracted by the listening materials, they voluntarily require doing listening practice and getting higher scores in the small quiz that followed. While when are not interested in the practicing materials, their enthusiasm decrease and the quiz scores are lower.(2) The experiment data in this study shows that students’age, sex, living background and contacting frequencies to English songs and movies do not influence the test scores.(3) The quality data shows that the concept of "interesting, abundant" listening materials is understood differently by different groups. For the senior school students whose listening practicing materials are always from textbooks or test papers, some short, funny stories may be enough to inspire their learning interests. While for the researchers and other adults, the simple stories are boring enough and they tend to choose songs, movies or online videos. Based upon the findings, this study recommends that:(1) Enhancing the senior high school English teachers’realization of the importance of listening practicing materials selection, which can be the initial step for making the proper listening practicing materials for senior high school students.(2) Knowing about the senior high school students’psychological and cognitive features through professional tests, through which the experts can confirm the type of listening practicing materials for the senior high school students.(3) Providing with the proper materials for the students by the common efforts of all the relating social resources.