An Application Of The Input Hypothesis To English Listening Acquisition In Senior Middle School

In Shanghai, a special listening class is not set in high school English classes, nor are English listening lessons given sufficient attention. During a very long period and even now, in most English teaching classes, it is common that teachers are still following the traditional and inefficient listening teaching method, which undoubtedly can’t contribute to provide efficient input materials to students and to further students’ listening competence. When it comes to the importance of language learning, it has long been recognized by the professionals in the fields at home and abroad. Input Hypothesis, one of the most influential theories, which is put forward by Krashen and it is the core of all his theories. However, how to fulfill the efficient listening teaching in high school English classes, as well as how to better conduct comprehensible input so as to enhance students’ listening skills, are the important focuses of this research.Foreign Language High School Affiliated to Shanghai Normal University is a district-level key high school, which is characterized by English language. The students are divided into English and non-English characteristic classes according to the students’ English scores and overall performance in English learning. The subjects in the research are the students from a non-English characteristic class in Senior Two.And the purpose of this research based on the guidance of the Input Hypothesis is to train the listening skills of the students. The main methods adopted are questionnaire investigation, tests and analyses of experimental data. At the end of the experiment,the experimental results have been analyzed by comparing with the data from the English characteristic class. The study based on Input Hypothesis increases the language input effectively in the teaching process and makes them more comprehensible, the results show that:First, to teach students to "listen to English" under the guidance of Input Hypothesis, in fact, is to teach students to master the ability of understanding the basis of the feedback information; meanwhile, is to develop the abilities in speaking,reading and writing.Second, high school students have improved their listening comprehension by training listening comprehension skills under the guidance of Input Hypothesis,exploring effective methods to improve listening comprehension skills, enhancing their input intelligibility in listening materials, and inputting a sufficient amount of the listening.