A Study On The Application Of English Movies To Listening Teaching In Higher-Vocational & Technical College

During English teaching process, listening practice plays the same important role in improving English ability as reading practice, writing practice and translation practice. However, in our English teaching, we focus more on reading, writing and translation practice compared with listening practice. And thus listening practice can be greatly improved in the aspect of class time, the variety and amount of practice and teaching result. The average level of listening ability of the English learners is much weaker according to the results showed in various tests. This situation shows to be more typical in higher-vocational and technical colleges as the students' lack of interests, poor basis in basic phonetic knowledge, vocabulary and grammar, and less listening practice time, etc.Our study has been based on the Input Hypothesis, the theory of the Zone of Proximal Development(ZPD) and Schema theory and related researches at home and abroad. We have tried to introduce some English movies favored by the students into listening class by setting teaching tasks and choosing specific targeted movie clips which have been aimed at the weakness in their phonetic knowledge, vocabulary and grammar, etc. We have chosen two similar classes in students' number, former foundation and teaching progress, one being experimental class, the other being control class to check the results of the application. The practice in the textbooks as well as the edited movie clips which have been used as supplementary materials have been employed into experimental class as teaching materials, while the control class have used the practice in the textbooks and other video materials. A pretest and a posttest have been conducted in both classes at the beginning and the end of the term respectively to show the changes in the students' listening ability. Besides, we have also designed a series of teaching activities to improve the students' comprehensive competence, such as dubbing, translation, etc.We believe that the precondition to have a successful English listening class based on movies is to choose specific targeted movie clips favored by the students and set appropriate teaching tasks. The findings of this research can enrich teaching contents and resources for higher-vocational and technical college English listening class, provide useful advice to English teaching and other language training and also lay the basis for further studies on English listening class based on movies. The limitations of the study are: limited class time and teaching materials, variousEnglish learning foundations of the objects and not well-rounded evaluation methods, which need to be improved to get better result and be applied widely later.