An Experimental Study Of The Effects Of English Pre-listening Activities On Listening Comprehension Among Junior Middle School Students

Listening is one of the key factors influencing people's communication and is put in the first place among the four basic skills of the language teaching and learning.However,in the practical English listening teaching and learning,it is difficult to improve students listening skills and their listening comprehension level,which has become a great challenge for teachers.Listening consists of pre-listening,while-listening and post-listening.Some research about pre-listening activities has proved that pre-listening activities can really improve students listening comprehension ability.But the studies still need to be explored further,especially studies about junior middle school students.The study aims to explore the effects of English pre-listening activities on listening comprehension among junior middle school students and the change of the students' attitude towards the pre-listening activities before and after the experiment.The author intends to figure out the following two questions in the present study.(1)Do the pre-listening activities take significant effects on students' listening comprehension performance? If yes,to what degree?(2)What's the change of the students' attitude towards the pre-listening activities before and after the experiment?And after the experiment,which patterns and types of pre-listening activities the students like?The subjects are the 77 students from the two classes of Grade seven in Nan Chang.The two classes are taught by the author and are divided into two groups-the experimental class and the control class.Before the experiment,the two classes had pre-test.Besides,the experimental class had a pre-questionnaire about their listening situation.According to the results of the pre-test,the listening levels of the two classes students have no significant difference.Then the experimental class got four months pre-listening activities training.And after the experiment,they received post-questionnaires and had post-test.The data of the study were analyzed by SPSS19.0.The descriptive statistics,paired-sample test and independent samples test were used to see the effects of pre-listening activities on students listening comprehension and their attitude to pre-listening before and after the experiment.Based on the results of the data,the major findings are as following:(1)The pre-listening activities are helpful for students' listening comprehension.The results of the pre-test show the English listening level of the two classes are similar.However,after the experiment,the average scores of the post-test of the experimental class are significantly higher than the control class,which demonstrates that there is a significant difference in listening level between the two classes.The results of the two tests show that pre-listening activities have great influence on students' listening comprehension and can improve students' listening comprehension.(2)The results of pre-questionnaire and post-questionnaires show that the students' attitudes toward pre-listening activities have great change before and after the experiment.After the experiment,students think they can apply listening strategies(such as prediction,inference and guessing according to the key words and context)in listening better and hold that providing background knowledge of new words and listening contents are helpful for their listening comprehension.But the subjects are still anxious before listening if they are not familiar to the topic.What's more,they have better understanding of pre-listening after the experiment.At last,the subjects express they like the vivid and lively activities most,such as videos and songs.And they hold that pre-listening activities such as pre-teaching vocabulary and providing the background knowledge are more helpful for their listening comprehension.At the end of the study,the author puts forward some implications about how to help students to improve their listening comprehension.For example,use kinds of pre-listening activities in listening class;teach students how to use listening strategy and what ought to do before listening;create a comfortable environment and provide background knowledge.In addition,some suggestions for future study are also mentioned.