A Study On The Application Of The Interacitve Model To Listening Teaching In The Senior Middle School

Listening comprehension is the essence of English listening teaching. Just asRichards (el al,2005) put it, listening comprehension is a process of comprehendingwhat has been said in a second or foreign language. Listening is an active, initiative andconscious mental process. Besides, it is a process where the listeners promptly perceive,parse, and utilize the oral text to construct (exactly reconstruct) the speaker’s originalintention and meanwhile the listeners must interact with the listening materials bymaking use of their background knowledge, linguistic competence and ideation. Thecore of listening comprehension research in second language learning is about the studyof single linguistic unit (such as phoneme, word, or grammar structure) and thefunctions of listeners’ expectation, contextual knowledge, background knowledge, andthe topic. Three popular and available processes to explain listening comprehension arebottom-up process, top-down process, and interactive process.Bottom-up model refers to the listeners, with the assistance of their linguistry,chunk and interpret the acoustic signals as sounds forming words, words formingphrases or clauses and clauses forming the whole coherent discourse. While top-downmodel refers to the listeners try to predict, analyze, estimate, and reason in order tocomprehend what has been heard by using clues of nonlinguistic knowledge (such ascontextual knowledge, world knowledge, strategic knowledge and topic informationetc.). Besides the above two processes of listening comprehension teaching, theinteractive model also enjoys popularity. It has two explanations. One refers to theinteractive process involving both bottom-up process and top-down process whichinteract and compensate with each other if necessary, and the other means theinteraction between the listener and listening materials.This thesis is designed to collect and analyze questionnaires from100freshmen ina senior middle school in Shaoxing, Zhejiang Province. With the help of thesequestionnaires, the author had a clear idea about students’ difficulty in listening and inmaking use of the listening strategies. After a three-month experiment, data werecollected and a comparison of the effects between traditional listening teaching andinteractive listening teaching was made. Having analyzed the data with the SPSS17.0software, the author found that students were more active to make use of their worldknowledge and background knowledge with the help of interactive model. Theycontinuously activate their existed schemas, perfect them and make the best of them to comprehend the oral text. These indicate that listeners and texts can work together aswell as the top-down process and the bottom-up process. Therefore, the author made aconclusion that it was more effective and efficient to teach listening comprehensionwith the interactive model.With the above experimental research and discussion, the author advises puttingmore emphasis on accumulating linguistic knowledge and activating nonlinguisticknowledge in English instructional settings. Only in this way can the listener interactwith listening materials and incorporate both bottom-up and top-down listeningprocesses. Thanks to the appropriate micro-skills, it is not that difficult for the listenersto reconstruct the speaker’s original intention.