Experimental Study On The Method And The Effect Of Intensive Listening In College English

With the advancement of the big data era, which have particularly changed the ways in which college students spend their time, listening has become one of the most challenging aspects of L2 development for foreign language learners.Given its central role in the new media age, listening has remained surprisingly under-researched in the field of L2 education, and those studies which seem to address this neglected aspect of language development have been generally concerned with listening as an end-point, rather than an active process of meaning making. Many, for example, reduce listening to finding the right answer to a set of comprehension questions at the end of a passage.During the author’s internship, she noticed that college non-English major students face a universal problem:they cannot automatically access phonemes they hear and link them with specific graphemes. That is, in other words, if the word is in the written form, they recognize and immediately know what it refers to, but if the word is spoken in the listening materials, they cannot comprehend its meaning and understand it at once. They have trouble in linking the sounds to their orthographic representations. It is thus evident that they have not established a close connection between the meaning of the word and its audio signal.This study aims to show that the use of intensive listening, which functions as a means to check students’autonomous listening practice after class, can improve college students’English listening proficiency. Different from the traditional dictation training, the experiment avail of the already learned passages in their Comprehensive English Course as listening materials and require students to conduct intensive listening practice of certain paragraphs after class for 10 minutes every day.By using a combination of questionnaire survey, sample listening comprehension test and interview as tool, the author made a comprehensive investigation into this issue. At the beginning of the experiment, the author randomly chose the experimental group and the control one based on their same level of pre-test results. And another class which is comparatively rather weak is labeled as the low-score group. The author taught Comprehensive English Course in accordance with the standards and requirements of Contemporary College English, making detailed explanations of the linguistic knowledge, such as unfamiliar vocabulary, long sentences, important grammar, as well as the content of the text, analysis of the structure to ensure that students have a general understanding of the text. Based on a certain degree of perception, the students from high-score group and low-score one are required to do intensive listening after class about certain paragraphs. To check whether the students have fulfilled their assignments after school, the author avail some of the class period to carried out read-aloud activities by random roll call or group chorus. The author then scored their performance on the basis that whether they can read the whole paragraph fluently without errors in sentence stress, rhythm and intonation. She also gave timely reviews and guidance as to the standard pronunciation and the correct way of punctuation so that students understand certain phonological knowledge and are able to imitate the intonation of the language through read aloud the text No extra demand was put on the control group except for normal period of classroom instruction. After one semester, all the students take part in another listening proficiency test to see if there is any change.The results of the listening proficiency test show great improvement of listening scores of the experimental group, which indicate that intensive listening practice of the familiar text has a positive effect on students’ listening proficiency, especially the low-score group. The research suggests that the practice of intensive listening based on textbook combined with the instruction of phonological instruction can induce students to internalize the listening material, improve the efficiency of autonomous listening and finally enhance their listening proficiency.