A Study On Application Of Shadowing Exercises In English Listening In Primary School

In China,the traditional English teaching mode stresses the reading and writing but neglects the listening and speaking.The traditional teaching regards listening as a passive information receiving process.As a result,the teachers neglect the method of instruction process in the listening process and only ask the students to listening without proper guidance,which makes the students get bored and lose interest in English learning.Shadowing exercise is a method which requires the listeners to speak along with the tape recorder nearly at the same time,and it can be used to train students' ability in speaking,listening as well as the allocation of their attention.This method requires the combined work of ear,mouth and brain,which needs the students' concentration.So it is regarded as a best way to improve the students' speaking speed,understanding speed and correcting the pronunciation and tones.Based on the current listening level of students in primary school,the author takes the multi-store model of memory and schema theory as theoretical foundation and attempts to apply the shadowing exercise into listening teaching to improve their listening ability.This study mainly focuses on the following three issues:(1)Can the shadowing exercise teaching method improve students' listening ability?(2)Which one is more effective to improve students' listening ability,the pre-shadowing or the poet-shadowing?(3)Is there a difference in the impact of the shadowing exercise on students with different levels of English?This study was conducted with 90 students from three classes in Grade Six of Wen Changgong national primary school in Tianjin.Class One was the control class,Class Two and Class Three were the experiment classes.The experiment lasted for four months.During the experiment,Class One was taught by the traditional teaching method,Class Two adopted the pre-shadowing exercise teaching method while Class Three adopted the post-shadowing exercise teaching method.Before the experiment,the three classes were first tested for listening to understand the students' listening situation and whether there were differences in the listening ability among the three classes.After the experiment,the three classes were tested for listening again and the collected data were quantitatively analyzed using SPSS statistical software.The experimental results show that: 1.Shadowing exercise can improve the students listening ability;2.The post-shadowing exercise is more effective than the pre-shadowing exercise on improving students' listening ability;3.The low score group is improved more than the high score group.The author suggests that when teaching English listening,the teachers can adopt post-shadowing exercise teaching method,which means to teach the important and difficult points occurred in the listening material first then do the shadowing exercise.In addition,the teachers should guide the students to do the shadowing exercise according to their different listening level,which helps to improve the students' listening ability.