Research On English Listening Class Teaching Based On Attention Alteration Rule

Listening, as a language skill most frequently used in daily life，is one of theimportant topic in the research of Second Language Acquisition. Therefore, the teachingof listening as EFL has drawn more and more attention. Listening comprehension is acomplex process of mental activities and requires strict concentration in informationprocessing, which is closely connected with attention, a phenomenon of cognitivepsychology.“Attention” refers to the selective direction and concentration phenomenonof individual psychological activity within a certain time. Attention is worthy of itsconcern in English listening teaching. However, the field of second language acquisitionand the related problems about attention is more a theoretical exploration, itsapplications in second language classroom listening teaching practice are few.In classroom teaching, the focus of “attention” of most studies is mainly about howto improve and maintain students’ attention as much as possible. However, listening is adiscipline of high attention and energy consumption, blindly keeping and concentratingstudents’ attention on class will probably backfire. Based on the analysis of listeningcomprehension and “attention”, this paper holds English listening teaching shouldfollow the “attention” alteration rule---a natural physiological and psychological process.As long as paying more attention to students’ physical and psychological process, moreefficient and satisfactory teaching effect can be achieved.The study was carried out in Sichuan International Studies University and61freshmen of non-English majors were selected. A questionnaire and written test paper asinstruments will be applied. After the collection and analysis of the data, the researchfindings are summarized as follows:Firstly, students’ attention can not be always focused in the class, instead, most ofstudents (90.16%) can not always concentrate their attention on the100-minutesEnglish listening class. Further more, student attention alters in class roughly like theshape of letter “M”: preparation-exciting-falling-recalling-exhausting; Secondly, in English listening class, the attention expending situations of variousbasic teaching contents, teaching tasks, teaching resources and frequently used teachingactivities are different;And finally, based on the alternation rules of “attention” in class, the Englishlistening teaching would achieve a more effective and satisfactory teaching result.In addition, this paper also finds other related conclusions, such as, in the former45minutes class, students’ attention can be more easily concentrated; during a day, thestudents’ attention in the former two classes in the morning, afternoon, and evening canattract students’ more attention than in the latter two classes, etc. In the end, the articlediscussed some research enlightenments of this study on foreign language teaching, andpresented some suggestions on how to efficiently arrange listening classroom teachingbased on the study.