An Application Of Interaction Hypothesis To College English Listening Teaching

Along with the arrival of the global village, English has been attached with more and more importance by the whole society. Actually nowadays, for the college students, English proves to be more like a catalyst for them to climb up a higher academic level. In accordance with the college English curriculum requirements, the teaching aim of college English is to cultivate college students’English comprehensive ability, the listening&speaking ability in particular, making them capable of having effective communications in English in their future study, work&social contacts, strengthening their autonomous learning ability and improving their overall cultural accomplishments, hence satisfying the requirements of social development and international exchange in our country. Nevertheless, at present, what the teaching model (explain new words---play the record---check the answers) adopted in the college English listening class realizes is checking students’listening comprehension ability instead of teaching them how to improve their listening comprehension ability, and under this model, many college students’ listening comprehension ability is still less than satisfactory.Input has been given much more attention in the second language teaching&learning for a time after Krashen put forward the input hypothesis, and college students got more chances to have English listening practice in class, while still, their listening comprehension ability and even English competence did not see substantial improvements; then following the output hypothesis proposed by Swain, the focus of English teaching transfers to output, and in line with the output hypothesis, language output plays a vital role in second language acquisition; later, integrating the comprehensible input, modified output and role of the conversation into a whole, Long put forward the interaction hypothesis and held that participation in interactions could benefit the second language learning.Based on the above theories, the author raises the following questions:(1) How to apply the interaction hypothesis to college English listening teaching?(2) Can the interaction hypothesis be helpful for improving students’ listening comprehension ability?Combined with the previous studies, this thesis tries to apply some practical and beneficial interaction strategies to the college English listening class. The author of the thesis conducted a comparative study for a semester on both the experimental class and the control class, carried out the pre-experiment test and post-experiment test on students of two classes, and then issued a questionnaire among these students; later, by aid of SPSS(Statistical Package for the Social Sciences), the author analyzed relevant data in a relatively scientific way and through quantitative analysis as well as qualitative research, obtained the findings that the application of interaction theory into the college English listening class can raise students’ enthusiasm in participation in the class and improve their listening comprehension ability to a certain extent.