The Impact Of Two Teaching Approaches To Movie Class On The Development Of Listening Ability For EFL Students

Listening is one of the primary skills in language learning, while natural language input is the most effective way of language acquisition. Along with the improvement of modern technology and multimedia, English listening teaching approaches have also made a great progress. English movie viewing as a teaching method is popular with most English language learners; further more Krashen’s Input Hypothesis also indicates that appropriately comprehensible input aids in the improvement of the learners’ English proficiency.Numerous studies have found that English movie viewing is significantly helpful for second language acquisition, including listening and vocabulary learning. Studies at home have mainly focused on the effect of input model and audio-visual material on listening competence, however, few studies on the training of EFL learners’listening competence through watching English movie have frequently been read, and even fewer studies are about vocational college students.During the nine-year English teaching experience, the author has noticed that students from police officers college mainly depend on class training to improve their English listening, and that the key listening material is the textbooks, and after class training is little. In the present study, two movie class teaching approaches are employed:one is quality-oriented, which is showing a movie several times for the students could understand or hear clearly every single word in the movie; the other is quantity-oriented, which is showing several movies once for the students only get abundant language input. Based on the above approaches two general research questions are raised:Research Question1:of the two teaching approaches:quality-oriented and quantity-oriented teaching approaches, which one is more effective to listening competence?Research Question2:How to conduct English movie class?First survey was administered to investigate students’ performance of listening learning in and after class. The responses of90sophomores from logistics management major in Anhui Vocational College of Police Officers were collected and analyzed. The results reveal that most students train listening at class, their main material was textbooks and extra listening materials are not available for them. Few students train their listening by watching English movie. Based on the survey, the experiment was conducted and data were collected through tests. The results of pretest and posttest indicate that:1. both quality-oriented teaching approach and quantity-oriented teaching approach have significant effects on students’listening ability development, but there is no statistically significant difference between the two teaching approaches;2. In terms of separated items, the two teaching approaches have significant effects on development of pronunciation, conversation, word dictation and news listening, whereas the two teaching approaches does not have significant effects on development of sentence dictation and passage listening. Though there is no statistical difference between the two teaching approaches, compared the growth rate of final score and separated items, the quality-oriented teaching approach is better than quantity-oriented teaching approach on the students’ listening ability.This study provides new findings about the influence of English movie viewing on listening. English movie class should combine the quality-oriented teaching approach and quantity-oriented teaching approach, which is repetitive input of various materials; and the lecturing procedure, could be divided into three stages: before-watching stage, while-watching stage and after-watching stage. At the before-watching stage mainly introduce some related information about the movie, at the while-watching stage mainly employ extensive movie viewing and intensive movie viewing approaches, and at the after-while watching stage could organize some activities to combine input and output.