An Empirical Study On Listening Teaching In College English From The Perspective Of Ecological Teaching

With the rapid development of globalization, more and morepeople begin toseek developments abroad. English has become an essential communicative tool.Therefore, how to improve the effect of listening teaching has already become animperative task in second language teaching.Most of the scholars at home and abroad have explored the studies on listeningteaching from the perspective of the knowledge input to learners. Based on theirstudies, optimizing the knowledge input to learners can effectively improve theirlistening competence. However, there are other factors in the listening class whichmay also be useful in influencing the effect of listening teaching, such as thestudents’ individual differences, the seat arrangement, class activities, trainingintensity, teaching instruments, listening materials and so on. These influentialfactors are rarely taken into the consideration in the listening teaching. In this thesis,the author tries to make an empirical study on the listening teaching from theecological teaching perspective. Under the guidance of the five basic principles ofecological teaching, including “Law of Limiting Factors”,“Law of Tolerance”,“Flowerpot Effect”,“Ecological Niche Principle”, and “Allee’s Principle”, theauthor conducted an experiment of ecological listening teaching in a college inShaanxi province, trying to find out the influential factors involved in listeningteaching. By optimizing and combining these influential factors with listeningteaching, the author tries to build an interrelated, dynamic and balanced ecologicallistening class, for the purpose of improving learners’listening competence.In the comparison of the post-test scores between the experimental class and thecontrol class, P=0.041<0.05, which means that there was significant difference in thestudents’ listening competence between the two classes after the experiment. Thestudents in the experimental class had better performance in the post-test than thestudents in the control class. In the interviews, interviewees also showed positiveattitude towards ecological listening teaching. Therefore, the ecological listening teaching is proved to be effective in improving students’ listening competence in theexperiment.Based on the study results, the author summarizes five characteristics of theecological listening teaching, including avoiding the limiting factors; breaking the“Flowerpot Effect”; abiding by “Law of Tolerance”; valuing the group effect andapplying the “Ecological Niche Principle”. The author also finds that besides thesufficient knowledge input, there are other factors which can influence the effect oflistening teaching, including the learners’interests in listening; teaching instruments;class activities; training intensity; seat arrangement; listening material andbackground knowledge of the learner. Ecological listening teaching combines allthese influential factors with listening teaching, and effectively cultivates learners’interest in listening, livens up the class atmosphere, increases more exposure tolistening for learners and builds an active and communicative listening class, withthe purpose to improve the effect of listening teaching at a comprehensive level.