An Empirical Study On The Application Of Dictation Practice To Improve Vocational College Students’ English Listening Competence

As the input stage of language acquisition, listening plays an important role in the target-language acquisition and communication. The ever-accelerated society also makes higher and higher requirements about the learners’ comprehensive ability of using English. Basing on those requirements, the text types in various English examinations are in continuous experimental and innovative stages. However, though there are changes in those examinations, the proportion of listening in the test is still on the rise. What’s more, the questionnaire results in numerous relevant researches have shown that a large amount of college students considered listening as the most difficult part in English study. Thus, optimizing the conventional mode of listening class in college as well as improving students’ listening proficiency and interests have become the foremost task for the English teachers and the hottest topic in relevant academic researches. Basing on the researches and classifications done by the predecessors as well as combining with the author’s individual study experience, this research will focus on an innovative mode of dictation practice, the aim of which is to qualifiedly and quantitatively explore whether this dictation mode has positive effect on improving students’listening competence. The research will base on schemata theory and the input-output theory, during which the new dictation mode introduced by the author will be applied to students’English class for18weeks. According to18weeks’dictation practice, the author will conduct an empirical research on this dictation mode with the70students majoring in computer network technology in Hubei Youth Vocational College as the research subjects.In order to make sure of the reliability and validity of the research, there is a series of complete procedures in the whole research process. The author has both qualitatively and quantitatively designed two questionnaires, an interview, a pre-test and a post-test. At the first stage of the research, the two classes were randomly divided into experiment class and control class. With the aim to timely get the first-hand information and know the students’changing state during the experiment, the author herself will be the students’ English teacher and will strictly follow the class designation’s requirement to organize students in conducting the dictation practice.The18weeks’research results can be concluded as follows:(1) Most of the subjects in experiment class agree with using this dictation practice mode in their English class and affirm the positive influence this practice has brought to them.(2) From the data comparison and analysis, this dictation practice mode has improved the average listening competence of the subjects. With the research process and results as basis, some conclusions will be drawn in the last part of this paper. The author will show some implications she has got from this research as well as point out the shortcomings, upon which coming up with some suggestions of improvement for the future research. The aim of this paper is to help students find out an effective way of improving their listening ability and make little contribution as possible to the English teaching innovation, especially the listening teaching in our country.