| Nowadays,the ability to interact with others is becoming more and more significant in language learning and assessment.It is common knowledge that“listening” is the basis of interaction and “interactive listening” is an important element of “interactional competence”.Interactive listening is conducive to the continuation of the conversation.To date,however,there are few studies related to interactional competence in China,especially the aspect of interactive listening among senior high school students.Therefore,this study,combing quantitative analysis with qualitative analysis,attempts to explore the feasibility and effectiveness of improving interactional competence of Chinese English learners in a classroom environment through the analysis of three interactive listening features,namely listenership displays,contingent responses,and collaborative completions.The purpose is to address the following two research questions:(1)What is the current situation of interactive listening competence of Chinese English learners of different proficiencies in senior high schools in pair interaction?(2)What are the effects of explicit instruction using materials from related Conversation Analysis research on interactive listening competence?In this experiment,a total of 36 participants,from two classes of a senior high school in Leiyang City,Hunan Province,were divided into the experimental group receiving explicit instruction and the control group without teaching intervention.There were 3 high-high,high-low and low-low level pairs in the experimental group and the control group respectively.The experiment lasted for 4 weeks.Eight types of interactive listening affiliated with the three features and corresponding audio-visual materials were selected for teaching intervention in the experimental group.Additionally,a pre-test and a post-test were carried out in both groups,and 36 dialogue recordings were collected.After transcribing the recordings,SPSS was used for statistical analysis,and the following research results were obtained:(1)Students of different proficiencies did not use interactive listening frequently in their pre-test conversations,with the average of 5.94 in each pair.There were only three types of interactive listening appearing in their conversations.Acknowledgement tokens,accounting for 97% of all the eight types of interactive listening,were mainly used to answer general questions,and rarely actively used to express their understanding of the prior turns.(2)In the post-test,the frequency of interactive listening used by students of different proficiencies from the experimental group,with the average of 24.78 in each pair,was significantly higher than that in the pre-test.And there was a significant difference in the frequency of interactive listening between the experimental group and the control group in the post-test.However,the teaching effects varied with the different types of interactive listening and the students’ English proficiency.The students had a higher degree of mastery of acknowledgement tokens,assessments,news markers and accounting while the teaching effects of the rest four types were barely satisfactory.And the low-low level pairs employed interactive listening less frequently than the high-high and the high-low level pairs.The research results reveal that,currently,the interactive listening competence of Chinese English learners in senior high school is relatively weak,and explicit instruction based on materials from Conversation Analysis research can improve interactive listening proficiency of Chinese English learners at different levels in senior high schools to a certain extent.On the basis of these findings,it is believed that there is a need for effectively integrating the research results of interactional competence into teaching practice,in particular for combining the authentic patterns of everyday interaction with English instruction,which is worthy of further large-scale empirical research. |
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