A Practical Study Of Teaching The Interactive Listening Strategy In A Secondary Vocational School

During our daily communicative activities,listening comprehension plays a vital role in facilitating language acquisition.Jim Trelease(1995)in his best seller The Read-Aloud Handbook mentions that if a kid(beginning learner)has never heard the word,he will never have the chance to say it,and if he has never said it or heard it,it will be tough to read it.Besides,mastering a fresh word in the context of a story is more helpful than learning it isolated from meaning on a flash card.In some sense,O'Malley and Chamot(1989)argue that listening comprehension has become the 'keystone' of many theories of second language acquisition.Therefore,listening is perhaps the most critical part for language learning,especially for those beginning learners.Furthermore,Burley-Allen(1995)adds that listening is actually a very powerful force in human relationships.He believes that listening,as a way of acknowledging someone,always increases self-esteem,and that true listening constructs teamwork,trust and a sense of belonging to a group.So according to him,listening encourages people to get self-confidence in professional growth and also helps improve their career satisfaction.Listening,as one of the four basic skills in acquiring language,is also an integral part of English teaching.It is a quite complex linguistic activity including varied psychological aspects;it is also a dynamic process in which learners actively understand and construct meanings.In addition,listening comprehension is an interactive process which integrates with the two listening models of "bottom-up" and "top-down".Currently,as a newly-developed teaching concept,this student-centered interactive listening model has drawn much attention from many other scholars.From a "bottom-up" perspective,teachers should consciously cultivate L2 listeners' basic linguistic ability in speech perception,word recognition,etc.in vocational senior class;from another "top-down" view,schemata knowledge should be also reinforced so as to fully develop students' listening comprehension by applying effective listening strategies.This thesis begins with two different invertible aspects of the interactive listening model-"bottom-up" and "top-down".Based on the difficulties that the vocational senior school students have had on these two aspects,the author employs a series of teaching strategies and activities.By conducting an experiment involving 60 participants enrolled in the author's school in 2017,both qualitative and quantitative methods are adopted in this thesis in an attempt to find out the solutions to the following questions:1.How will the training programe act on and improve the aspect of "top-down"processing for secondary vocational school students,especially those from the low proficient group?2.How will the strategy training programe influence the students' academic performance and their learning interests?3.How is the validity and feasibility of the interactive listening stragtegy implemenated in the author 's secondary vocational school?The results of the experiment show that the "top-down" strategy is not the privilege of those students from the high proficient group.After training,students from the low proficient group make rapid progress in regards to the aspect of the "top-down" processing,and they tend to catch up with those more able students in a way regarding the application of this relevant strategy.Besides,students from both the high and low proficient groups benefit a lot from this training programe.Their adoption of the relevant strategies is greatly enhanced,their listening grades are considerably improved and also their learning interests are significantly motivated.The findings of the empirical research are finally used to verify the strong feasibility and validity of the interactive listening strategy teaching and application in the author's school.In this way,learners could finally make clear the relationship between their listening proficiency and their listening model preferences,thus ultimately selecting suitable listening strategies to enhance their comprehension in both listening and application of English.