Study On Barriers And Strategies In English Listening Learning For Gao Chongshan Middle School Students

Research on listening strategies is of great importance in the field of secondlanguage acquisition. Its achievements not only make the teachers and researchersbetter understand the nature of language and language learning process but also offerthem more theoretical foundations for designing teaching syllabus and improvingteaching methods. It is generally thought that listening strategies can be taught andtrained. The tasks of language teachers include not only the language teaching but alsothe ways on how to learn the language. Listening strategy is one of important ways ofknowledge learning to make the process of language learning and the use of languagemuch easier and smoother.Based on the actual situation of listening teaching in Gao Chongshan MiddleSchool where the author of the thesis is working, this thesis discusses the barriers thataffect the students’ listening comprehension in junior middle school. It talks about howto train the students’ listening strategies and improve their listening skills. It alsoinvestigates the students’ awareness and use of listening strategies and probes intodifferent factors affecting the students in the process of listening training, such as thefactors of basic knowledge of the language and cultural background knowledge as wellas psychological factors. Chapter four of the thesis discusses how to train students’listening strategies, how to overcome psychological barriers and how to improve thestudents’ listening comprehension through training the students’ ability of guessing themeaning of the words and note taking, strengthening their vocabulary and grammarlearning and learning in an authentic environment. In chapter five, through theexperiment, the comparison of the test results of the experiment class and contrastclass is made in order to find the relationship between the strategy training andrelevant test results. It can be seen from the investigation of the pre-training andpost-training results, the students in the experiment class make more progress thanthose in contrast class in listening skills and listening abilities. The experiment provesthe efficiency and the feasibility of listening strategy training to some extent.The pedagogical implications of this research are as follows:Firstly, learning is not just a one-way transmission or a passive process with thelearners as the passive receivers. Listening learning is an active process of knowledgeconstruction, in which learners’ cognitive activities have to be taken into consideration.Therefore, teachers should take into account the students’ cognitive activities and work out effective ways to make students actively engaged in the process of listeninglearning.Secondly, language teaching and learning not only involve the learning oflanguage forms but also involve the learning of the culture of the target language.Therefore the main task of the teachers is to offer students effective ways andstrategies on how to learn. In the process of teaching, teachers should take effectivemeasures to ensure the students’ good mastery of both the language forms and theculture and relevant schematic knowledge of the target language.To sum up, listening teaching is relatively a new topic all the time. Teachersought to constantly learn new theories on teaching and spare no efforts in makinginnovations in teaching based on the actual situations of the students.