Study On The Application Of Wechat In College English Listening And Speaking Course

With the rapid development of digital information technology and mobile communication technology, mobile phone media is rapidly penetrating into people’s daily life. As an instant messaging application, WeChat is spreading and developing at a tremendous speed. Based on the search of relevant literature, we found that currently there are many researches on the application of WeChat in the education of primary and junior high schools in China, but its application in colleges and universities lays more emphasis on students’ ideological education and still lacks of systematic research on the application of WeChat in classroom teaching. This research takes WeChat as the learning tool, adopts historical literature research method, action research method combined with questionnaire survey method, interview survey method to investigate in the process, strategy and evaluation of applying WeChat in the teaching of listening and speaking English in college. Lastly, it adopts listening and speaking tests to test the experiment effect and puts forward promotion suggestions.This paper elaborates the research background, introduces relevant theories, summarizes the research results on the application of WeChat technology in the teaching, analyzes the main factors affecting the learning of listening and speaking English, briefly introduces functions and features of WeChat, clarifies its application advantages in teaching, designs experimental teaching process and WeChat application cases in speaking English, listening English and English corner according to the textbooks of New Horizons College English on listening and speaking English and the front-end analysis results, and then collects data through field experiments, open-ended and close-ended questionnaire surveys, sums up the advantages and disadvantages of the application of WeChat technology in the listening English teaching according to the data analysis and puts forward suggestions on teaching application.Research shows that: 1. The use of WeChat has changed the traditional teaching mode of listening and speaking English in university, which is consistent with the relevant requirements of Curriculum and Teaching Requirements on College English. Meanwhile, it also has promoted the students to carry out mobile learning, stimulated students’ interests in taking college English courses, improved the efficiency of classroom teaching and facilitated students to make full use of their spare time. 2 WeChat can better support the communications between teachers and students as well as communications among students. Teachers can use WeChat to send learning materials to students and offer guidance so as to get a clearer understanding of the difficulties students meet with in learning; students can share learning materials and exchange learning experience on WeChat. 3. WeChat can better support the teaching of speaking English in college. Firstly, it can help students to avoid the embarrassment of face to face communication, overcome anxiety in speaking English and correct their pronunciations; secondly, it helps teachers to monitor classes effectively and improve classroom teaching efficiency; lastly, it contributes to the preservation and utilization of information generated in the students’ process of practicing oral English so as to provide the basis for students assessment and teaching evaluation. At the same time, WeChat can better support the teaching of listening English in college, which is reflected in that it can promote effective communication in and out of the classroom, provide a convenient platform for teachers to organize and carry out listening comprehension practices and tests for students, provide direct data for teachers’ evaluation of students’ listening comprehension ability and provide reference for summative assessment of teaching. 4. The application of WeChat in the teaching of listening and speaking English in college helps to save teaching time in classroom with the main reflection being that part of English movie appreciation courses now can be conducted off class, which promotes and strengthens students’ understanding of knowledge and saves valuable time of classroom teaching at the same time. 5. Online English corner activities carried out using WeChat are conducive to students’ comprehensive application of listening and speaking ability and can help them to find out their mistakes in the communication process and make improvements so as promote their ability to communicate in English in real situations. It acts as a warm-up for the students to participate in the English corner activities offline. Although WeChat can mobilize students’ enthusiasm to participate in online English corner and other similar extracurricular activities, it is difficult to stimulate students’ interests to participate in classroom activities. 6 WeChat has obvious advantages in mobile learning when compared with other tools, but it also has its defects in function when it comes to learnings based on PC client end and webpages. In this aspect, it can not be compared with network learning platforms, micro-blog, etc. 7. The deficiency of applying WeChat in teaching is obvious, which is that teachers can not monitor students’ states of using mobile phones, students are easy to be attracted by chatting messages and get absent-minded, which in turn affects the effect of learning.In order to give play to WeChat technology’s advantages in teaching support, overcome the defects of its application in teaching, teachers are suggested to do the following in the application process: 1. Design the teaching effectively; 2. Divide studying groups reasonably; 3. Offer timely guidance to college students.