An Empirical Study On The Improvement Of The First-year Non-English Major Undergraduates’ Listening Competence Based On The Task-based Approach

Listening is regarded as one of the basic skills in language learning. It is also considered as a most important aspect in daily communication, and listening teaching has long been a controversial topic. Many scholars abroad and at home have put forward a number of teaching methods to foster students’ listening abilities. But nowadays, the methods of listening teaching are still traditional. Many factors, such as old teaching ways, students’ low interests and so on, restrict the improvement of listening competence greatly. So now an urgent problem to solve is to find out the effective ways to improve the students’ listening competence. At present, the ways to teach English listening and improve the learners’ listening competence can be often found abroad and at home, but there is little research on the connections between the listening teaching mode and the improvement of listening competence based on the statistical analyses.Under this circumstance, the experiment combining the mode of teaching with students of first year non-English major is carried out to find out the differences in the use of different teaching modes. By means of the pretest, posttest, questionnaires (teacher’s edition and student’s edition) and interview, and under the analysis of SPSS 13.0, this study intends to probe into the following research questions:(1) Can listening teaching provide positive effect on listening learning? (2) Is there any difference between the traditional listening teaching mode and TBA mode when they are used to improve the students’ listening competence?This study includes the control group (CG) and the experimental group (EG), in which the participants are all from Anhui Science and Technology University. In CG, there are 39 students with 16 males, and in EG, there are 40 students with 17 males. Before the study, all the participants are tested to find whether they have the same English levels or not. In CG, the traditional listening teaching mode is adopted, while in EG, the study adopts TBA mode.After the analysis of the data and information, the study reaches the following results:(1) Listening teaching can provide the students with the positive effect; (2) Both the two listening teaching modes can improve the students’ listening competence, but compared with the traditional teaching mode the TBA mode can make the students produce greater interest in listening learning, and make greater progress.This study is helpful to improve the students’ listening competence, and can provide the listening teaching with a certain brand of reference and guidance. First, this study marks clearly the connections between the listening teaching mode and listening competence; second, this study can help the teacher to know the students’ learning needs so as to give the guidance. In addition, this study can help the teacher to improve their listening teaching.