An Empirical Study Of The Recitation Input For The Development Of Junior High School Learners’ Listening Competence

Recently, more and more scholars have attached a lot of importance to the researches on English listening teaching and learning. However, those researches are not wide and deep enough, and most of them are theoretical, not empirical. Reciting text is not only a significant way to acquire language input, but also a very important traditional way of teaching and learning, which can help language learners improve their English communicative competence. This thesis aims to know if there are any relations between recitation input and development of learners’ listening competence,and to answer the following two questions: 1) What are the functions of recitation input to the development of junior high school learners’ competence? 2) Is junior high school learners’ reciting ability related to their listening ability?From the prospective of improving learners’ listening competence through recitation input, based on the Input Hypothesis, the Affective-filter Hypothesis, the Hypothesis of Frequency Effects, and the Theory of Chunk, this empirical study takes a reciting experiment on students in grade 3, class 3 of Zishui Junior High School as an example. In this research, there are two listening comprehension tests, and one is before the experiment while the other is after it. After the first test, the students are divided into two groups, a experiment group and a control group. The experiment group are supposed to take a 5-week lasting reciting experiment. After the second test,the grade data of every student’s in the two tests are supposed to be gathered respectively, according to groups, as the experimental statistics to be comparatively analyzed later for discovering the functions of recitation input to the development oflearner’s listening competence. Besides, there is an extra reciting test following which aims to check the experiment group students’ reciting abilities and numerate them as scores too, and then analyze whether there is correlation between them and students’ scores in the second listening comprehension test. In addition, during the research,there are two questionnaire surveys separately right after two listening comprehension tests, and one more interview after the first questionnaire survey on particular students,and those are for realizing students’ current learning situation of English listening,their learning habits, and the attitudes towards and the understanding of reciting text as an evidence and an extension of this research.As a consequence, it indicates that 1) recitation input can help improve junior high school learners’ listening competence, and especially for average students, the more text they recite, the more improvement they will get. 2) there is a correlation between students’ reciting ability and their listening competence, and students with good reciting ability tend to be better at English listening comprehending. Therefore,in current English teaching and learning, we teachers should regard reciting objectively as an important way of language learning, and use it properly to help learners increase their language input, accelerating the second language acquisition.