A Survey On English Interactive Listening Teaching In Senior High Schools

As one of the four basic skills of English learning, listening plays a moreand more important role in senior high school teaching. However, senior highschools are different in the economic conditions, teacher resources and listeningfacilities; in addition, the traditional way of listening teaching has many problems.Most senior high schools don’t have formal and specialized listening classes, andthe students’ listening level is low at large.Based on the input and output theory and cognitive psychology, Brown(2001) put forward the theory of interaction. Interaction emphasizes theteacher-student and student-student communication in the process of teaching andlearning. Moreover, this theory proposes that students are not the passivereceivers but the active constructors of the knowledge. Interactive listeningteaching emphasizes the importance of interaction in the classroom, andencourages teachers to integrate listening and speaking into the listening classes,so that to improve students’ competence of communication.Based on the interaction theory, this thesis is to investigate the situation ofEnglish interactive listening classes of senior high schools and answer thefollowing three questions:1. How is interaction practiced in senior high English listening classes?2. What roles does interaction play in the stages of pre-listening, while-listening,and post-listening?3. What are teachers’ roles in an English interactive listening teaching class?The results of the questionnaires and interviews show that interactioninfluences listening classes. More and more teachers and students have realizedthe importance of interaction. However, there are still some problems aboutinteraction in the listening classes. Interaction is practiced mainly byteacher-student and student-student interaction models. So interaction models inlistening classes are too simple, and lack of the students’ initiative interaction;interactive activities only concentrate on the stage of pre-listening, and there islittle interaction at the phase of while-listening and post-listening; teachers’ rolesare too simple in interactive activities, and most of the teachers still control theinteractive activities.Some pedagogical implications are put forward based on the major findingsof this study to help teachers and students of senior high schools construct more effective interactive listening classes and improve students’ listening competencefrom whole aspects.