A Study On Applying The Trace Model Of Speech Perception To English Listening Teaching For Junior Middle School

The first step of language learning is language perception, which includes speech perception and written language perception. Speech perception deals with acoustic information and linguistic information in speech. Speech sounds don’t have steady acoustic features, which means the same sound differs in different accents and also they differs when combined with other sounds, so speech perception is a complex psychological process.The trace model of speech perception proved by McClelland&Elman inl986is key to speech perception study in psychological linguistics. It focuses on the course of speech perception which means the course from the confirming and processing of speech sound stimulations to the last perception of speech contents and meanings. The trace-model stresses the bottom-up and up-down mechanism between cognitive units on the speech sound features level, the phoneme level and the word level, which is suitable to explain segments perception and perception in non-ideal context.This study first analyzes the present situation and causes of English listening teaching in junior middle schools, which is based on the statistical results from the English listening teaching strategies questionnaires. It demonstrates the importance of English listening teaching as well. Then it theoretically states the impetus of the speech sound teaching to English listening teaching. The study also attempts to find out the relationships between English speech sounds learning and English listening, reading and writing skills. To find out the effects of applying the trace model of speech perception in junior middle school English listening teaching, a teaching experiment which lasted two and a half months was carried out. Through quasi-experiment design, the experiment takes one hundred middle school students in their ninth grade as studying objects. After assigning the experiment class and contrast class, strict experiment steps are carried out and data of the experiment are collected in time. By the significance test of the data, the conclusion is that systematic teaching on three levels of speech sounds features, phonemes and words teaching for ninth-grade junior middle school students will stimulate their listening and reading skills efficiently, but devotes little to writing skills. Further more, some English listening teaching strategies combined with the author’s teaching experience which can be applied to enhance the listening teaching efficiency in junior middle school are offered in the last chapter.