| Listening,as the most significant aspect of the four language skills,plays a central role in English learning.However,listening teaching is less valued by teachers today,and many teachers and students are inclined to pay more attention to English reading and writing than listening,which leads to scarce listening input.Besides,the effect of listening teaching and learning leaves much to be desired with the traditional teaching model.Most junior middle school students feel that listening learning is so difficult and they have suffered from varying degrees of listening anxiety during the listening practice and listening test.In view of the problem,the author,enlightened by the Input Hypothesis,the Affective-filter Hypothesis and the Schema Theory,intends to investigate whether the Narrow Listening has positive effects on junior middle school students' English listening anxiety as well as their listening proficiency.By adapting both quantitative and qualitative method,this thesis aims to probe into the following three questions: 1)Can Narrow Listening alleviate junior middle school students' English listening anxiety? If it can,which dimensions of listening anxiety are alleviated? 2)Can Narrow Listening improve the junior middle school students' English listening proficiency? 3)What is the correlation between English listening anxiety and listening proficiency?A total of 76 junior middle school students of Grade Two from two classes took part in this study for 10 weeks.Class one was taken as the Control Class(CC)with38 students and class two as the Experimental Class(EC)with 38 students.Before the experiment,a pre-questionnaire(Foreign Language Listening Anxiety Scale),designed by Kim(2000),was conducted to check whether students have the same degree of listening anxiety in two classes and a pre-test was carried out to measure whether English listening proficiency of students from two classes was at the same level.During the teaching experiment time,the Control Class was taught in a conventional method-extensive listening,while Experimental Class was instructedin a new teaching method-Narrow Listening.After the experiment,a post-questionnaire and a post-test were carried out to testify the effectiveness of Narrow Listening.All data were collected by the author and the results were analyzed with the SPSS 20.0.Additionally,an interview was conducted in Experimental Class to get some information about students' attitude and opinions about Narrow Listening.The major findings from the study are summarized as follows: 1)Narrow Listening can alleviate junior middle school students' English listening anxiety.Narrow Listening relieves listening anxiety in four dimensions,fear of listening to spoken English;process-related anxiety;lack of self-confidence and apprehension of insufficient relevant knowledge as well;2)Narrow Listening can improve the junior middle school students' English listening proficiency;3)There was a significantly negative correlation between listening anxiety and listening proficiency.Among the four dimensions of English listening anxiety,the lack of self-confidence and apprehension of insufficient relevant knowledge had significantly negative correlation with students' listening proficiency,while the fear of listening to spoken English and process-related anxiety had no significantly negative correlation with students' listening proficiency.Therefore,teaching of listening with the Narrow Listening based on three theories can alleviate students' listening anxiety and improve their listening proficiency more effectively than the traditional listening teaching method.At the end of the thesis,some pedagogical implications are provided for both teachers and students.For one thing,teachers should select listening materials that are appropriate to students' listening proficiency and caters to their interest as well.For another thing,students should regard Narrow Listening as an auxiliary way to help them build self-confidence in listening learning and facilitate their listening learning. |
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