An Empirical Study Of EFL Listening Teaching Based On Authentic Materials

China’s increasing contacts with foreign countries and current college English teaching situation make Ministry of Education issue "The College English Teaching Requirements". The Requirements point out that college English teaching objective is to train students’ listening and speaking ability. How to improve students listening comprehension has become a difficult task for English teachers.As we know, listening comprehension is one of the important parts in language acquisition. According to Krashen, listening materials chosen should be suitable to learner’s level or slightly higher. However current listening textbooks focus on standard language, which is very different from real language in use. Students feel very embarrassed when communicating with native English speakers for they can not understand what they are saying. This is because they are not familiar with real language in use. This shows that listening materials play a very important role in improving students’listening comprehension.In the study, the researcher investigates the importance of listening materials through experiment and class observation. It involves184freshman in Northeast Petroleum University, whose major is oil and gas storage and transportation. They were divided into3groups according to their teaching classes. Class3and4were control group using listening textbooks; Class5and6were experimental group1using authentic materials; Class7and8were experimental group2using authentic materials as well as listening textbooks. After16weeks teaching,184students were tested by CET4. In accordance with the principle of sampling selected, data collected from30students in each group. By analyzing data using Univariate Analysis of Variance of SPSS software, experiment group2teaching achieved the best results and experiment group1teaching achieved better results than the control group. From what we have analyzed, we may safely come to the conclusion that authentic materials contribute to improving learners’listening comprehension. If we use authentic materials as well as textbooks, we will achieve a better teaching effect.From class observation, the researcher finds the students in control group had less interest in what they were listening to, this may because the listening materials had no plot but only informative exercises and they had no desire to attend class activities, whereas the students who listened to authentic materials (including English songs, episode of films, VOA news and so on) had different performance in English classes. They show greater interest in authentic materials partly because authentic materials were close to students’life and they more or less keep up with the real time news, which helped them understand meaning.The researcher clarifies the importance of authentic materials in learning through the research on different listening materials and explores what kind of listening materials can improve learners’ listening comprehension. However, what kind of authentic materials improve listening comprehension better is a question that makes the researcher further study.