The Application Of Constructivism To Multimedia English Listening Teaching

Since college English teaching reform in2004, Ministry of Education has issuednew college English teaching course requirements, which proposes the goal of collegeEnglish teaching is to develop the ability of college students to use the languagesynthetically, especially listening and speaking (Education Ministry,2004). Thisrequires the majority of English teachers and learners to find effective ways toimprove the efficiency and effectiveness of listening learning. With the applicationand development of multimedia computer technology, foreign language teachingworkers have felt strongly about the importance and necessity of multimedia beingused in listening teaching. The combination of multimedia and listening teachingenables the teaching and learning activities to integrate text, sound, graph, animationand other functions to mobilize and inspire the activeness of students to learn in amaximum way so as to improve teaching efficiency. With the deepening ofpsychologists’ study on cognitive laws of human learning process in recent years,constructivist learning theory, an important branch of cognitive learning theory, hasgradually been widely used in foreign language teaching. The variety of features ofthe multimedia computer and the Internet-based network communications technologyare particularly suitable to the constructivist learning environment. In other words,multimedia computer and network communications technology can be used as idealcognitive tools in the constructivist learning environment to effectively promotestudents’ cognitive development.On the basis of previous research in the field and using the teaching theory ofconstructivism for reference, this paper researches on how to apply constructivistteaching theory to the listening teaching in the multimedia network environment.Withthis research purpose, the writer has designed an experimental teaching lasting for18 weeks to answer the following researching questions:I whether the multimedia listening teaching mode under constructivism is moreeffective to improve listening ability than the traditional teaching mode? II whetherthe new teaching mode can arouse the interest of the students and encourage theirlearning attitude.For the survey, the writer has extracted two classes of English major enrolled in2011of Qingdao Binhai University; whose listening levels are proximal, with one asthe experimental class and the other as the control class. Related data is worked outvia questionnaires, classroom observation and listening tests both before and after theexperiment, and then a comparative analysis is made on the two groups of data. Theresults of the experiment show that the students of the experimental class acceptingthe new listening teaching mode perform much better in listening scores than studentsof the control class and the vast majority of students think that the new multimedialistening teaching mode is of great help in improving their listening levels and hopethat teachers will continue to use this way in future listening teaching.The writer hopes that the conclusions of this study can be a valuable reference tothe future effective implementation of the multimedia-assisted teaching of collageEnglish listening.