Effect Of Reading Aloud On Students' Listening Comprehension In Senior Middle Schools

Since the implementation of the new English curriculum standards all over the country in 2003,students' comprehensive ability,listening,speaking,reading and writing ability,has been paid more attention to in English Teaching in senior high school,especially,listening skills are becoming more and more important for the students in non-English speaking countries.At the same time,in the new curriculum standards,much higher and more specific objectives and requirements for senior high school students in English listening are put forward.However,in the practical teaching process,the teaching method is too old and blunt,and the students' listening level is relatively lower than reading level.Students often couldn‘t identify familiar words,phrases and even the sentences the moment they listen to the tape,but they can recognize them easily and quickly when reading the typescripts.Therefore,for ordinary senior high school students,how to improve students‘ listening comprehension ability has become an urgent problem to be solved in English teaching.In this paper,the author reviewed plenty of relevant literatures,such as: the nature and process of listening;the essence and process of reading aloud;the key to listening comprehension is the sound discrimination;as well as the working principles of sound discrimination system.Reading aloud,as a traditional language input and output teaching activity and learning methods with multiple organs,has been attached importance to by language learners and many teachers,but through the related literature,the author found that the research on the application of reading in English listening teaching is very little,especially the use of reading aloud in the senior high school English teaching activities.The purpose of this study is to explore the effects of reading aloud on English listening comprehension in senior high school and to find an effective way to improve English listening in senior high school.In this thesis,the writer attempts to explore the effect of reading aloud on listening comprehension in senior high school,so the following three questions are addressed.Question 1: what is the students‘ perspective of reading aloud in senior high school? Question 2: Can employing reading aloud in English listening arouse students‘ confidence attitude and reading aloud habit in listening? Question 3: Can reading aloud improve students‘ listening comprehension? In order to handle these questions,an experiment is carried out.The subjects of the current empirical research are mainly senior three students of 70 in Minqin No.1 middle school,and the theoretical basis are Krashen's input hypothesis,Merril Swain's output theory and Constructivism Theory.The procedures of the study are: investigate the present perspective of English reading aloud in daily English learning by using pre-questionnaire;design a 14-week training activity about reading skills and phonological awareness;and through the comparison between pre-test and post-test,distribute the post-questionnaire in order to find out the change of the students' attitude to listening.Research data in this study contain the results of the two questionnaires and the marks of the two listening tests,which are analyzed using SPSS 19.0.The results show that reading aloud does have a positive effect on English listening comprehension for senior high school students,which can help students improve their listening comprehension.At the end of this paper,the important findings of this study are described,and it is practically feasible and effective for the students with poor English from rural high schools to employ reading aloud activity in the English listening class.Reading-aloud activity can stimulate the students' interest and attitude,build up their confidence in learning English listening,and form the habit of reading aloud.Of course,because of the limited scope of the study,and the limitation of other conditions,there are still many deficiencies in this research,which need to be studied and improved further in the future.