Study On The Feasibility Of Output Hypothesis In Listening And Speaking Teaching In Independent Colleges

With the growth of international exchanges, English has already become an important means to communicate with external world. Listening and speaking are the precondition of English communication. For years, experts and scholars have conducted their researches in listening and speaking teaching from empirical and theoretical perspectives, but there was little improvement in listening and speaking results. Traditional teaching method---"listening-checking-explaining" is no longer suitable for the requirement of our listening and speaking teaching. We need a new teaching method urgently. Therefore, the author put forward an integrated teaching method based on the output and input hypothesis according to the features of students in independent college.This thesis used output hypothesis as the theoretical frame, adding some output forms including speaking and writing in the process of language input. The teaching forms include retelling and repeating the story, task-based group discussion, debating and taking notes and so on. The author experimented with60non-English major students from Optical and Electrical Information College for one semester, at that time they were freshmen. The result of pre-test showed the students in the two classes had the similar listening proficiency. Two different teaching methods were used in both classes, the experimental class would add some output activities on the basis of listening, whereas the control class still used traditional listening method. At the end of the semester, the post-tests were given to both classes, then the results of them were input into the SPSS (11.5) software to analyze. Significant differences were found in the results of the post-test, which indicated the experiment was successful. Questionnaires and interviews were adopted subsequently to know the difficulties students encountered in the process of the experiment and whether they enjoyed this teaching method or not. Finally, the author drew the conclusion that the input-output method did play an important role to some extent, and it is worthy of further study.