A Study Of Using Pre-listening Activities To Improve The Junior High School Students’ Listening Skills

As one of the four language skills, listening is an essential part in Englishteaching. Listening skills have become more and more important as a communicationtool today. The ability to understand what others say is the precondition ofcommunication. Experts in the filed of listening teaching skills usually divide thelistening process into three stages: pre-listening, while-listening and post-listening.Among the three stages, the pre-listening is often neglected in the class. Thepre-listening stage is the activities before while-listening, and it can make preparationfor the while-listening stage. Pre-listening activities can help students to build thebackground information and reduce students’ anxiousness.The schema theory is the theoretical foundation of the study. Schema can bedivided into linguistic schema (vocabulary, grammar, etc.), content schema (cultureand background information involved in the listening materials and different kinds oftopics) and formal schema (the style and structure of the listening materials, etc.). Ifthe teacher can do some activities in the pre-listening stage to help students to build therelevant schema of the listening materials, it can help students to improve theirlistening skills.This thesis studies the pre-listening stage. Through the questionnaires and theteaching experiment, the author hopes to confirm that the pre-listening activities canimprove the students’ listening skills.Through the questionnaire survey, the author finds the following points: firstly,many students like listening; the students who do not like it think that the listeningclass is kind of boring, and they lack listening strategies. Secondly, some students donot have a correct understanding of listening training, for example, some studentsconsider listening training just as a means to improve listening skills, while they do notrealize that listening training can become a tool to know the world. Thirdly, students donot understand the concept of pre-listening stage very well, and most students only do the pre-listening activities occasionally.In order to verify that these problems can be solved in the pre-listening stage, theauthor did a two-month teaching experiment. The author used two different ways toteach listening between the experimental group and the control group. The authordesigned different activities in the pre-listening stage for the experimental group. Thecontrol group used the formal teaching methods. Both groups improved after twomonths of the experiment, but the experimental group’s improvement was moreobvious. The result shows that the pre-listening activities can improve students’listening skills, and help students to develop a good listening training habit.Finally, the author has proposed some suggestions: building students’ languageschema, content schema and formal schema, stimulating students’ interests and helpingstudents to predict the listening materials. The author hopes that this thesis will givesome help to the junior high school English teachers in teaching listening.