Ａ ｓｔｕｄｙ ｏｎ Ｅｎｇｌｉｓｈ Ｌｉｓｔｅｎｉｎｇ Ｔｅａｃｈｉｎｇ

连春娥

【摘 要】在现代的英语教学中，教师总是会花大量的时间用来提高学生的听力能力，因为听力是学生最薄弱但在交流中又最为重要的一个能力。这篇文章主要从三个方面阐述了怎样提高学生的听力能力：第一是训练他们运用一些听力技巧；第二是把听说练习结合起来；第三是把听写练习结合起来。

【关键词】英语听力教学 听力技巧 听力能力

ⅠIntroduction

With the continuous development of the society , English is no longer a foreign language; it has become a basic social skill. As the learning of language starts from listening and speaking, our premier task of teaching is to improve student' ability in listening and speaking. I have done an investigation. About 43.2% of the students think that the most bothering and most difficult is listening comprehension, and even some of them have difficulty in understanding their teacher who gives lessons in English. Without question, it is difficult to understand the listening material, if he hasn't enough vocabulary and the ability of telling the grammar construction. In my investigation, about 35% of the students with low listening comprehension think this is because they don't understand or know the knowledge about linguistic, they are not able to tell the means of what they have heard. In my another investigation, students were asked to listen to a dialogue of 244 words, in which the words and grammar have already been learned. But 80% of them thought it was too difficult. Then , using the same dialogue as a reading comprehension material, I found only 5% of them thought it was a little difficult, on the other hand , response ability is also another reason. Listening teaching plays a very important part in English teaching. Today more and more foreign language teachers have concerned with developing students' listening ability. However, few teachers would say it is easy to teach listening. There are two main reasons. First, since listening is a mental activity carried out in one's head, it is very difficult to know exactly what mental processes are involved as one tries to extract meaning from an aural text. Hence the difficulty for a teacher to monitor the listening processes of his students or to detect the problems his students might encounter. Second, to listen successfully, students should not only understand the language itself but have knowledge of such things as the topic, the context, the background and so on.

The traditional method of teaching listening is listening first and then checking students' answers. In this way some good students may get some words and expressions. But for some other students who are weak in English will get nothing, which makes them worried and frightened. Even worse they may slowly lose the interest of learning English.

During my teaching, I try my best to solve the students' difficulty in listening in three ways. The first is training them to use some listening techniques; The second is combining listening and speaking practice together, The third is combining listening and writing exercises. With these three skills training together the students listening ability have improved a lot. Now I will discuss them in detail one by one.

（一）Listening techniques

Listening is so important in our daily life that more and more foreign language teachers have become concerned with developing students' listening ability . However, few teachers would say it is easy to teach listening. First, since Listening is a mental activity carried out in one's head, it is very difficult to know exactly what mental processes are involved as one tries to extract meaning from an aural text. Hence the difficulty for a teacher to monitor the listening processes of his students or to detect the problems his students might encounter. Second, to listen successfully, students should not only understand the language itself but have knowledge of such things as the topic, the context, the speakers and so on. Therefore, when teaching listening, a teacher need to tackle more than just his students' language problems. However, given the significance of listening in real life, fewer and fewer teachers can afford not to include listening as part of their language teaching.

My students meet the following practical problems when they are listening:

Some students say: When I listen to English, what worries me most is my limited vocabulary. If I come across a new word, I stop to think about its meaning and so miss the next part of the speech.

Some students say: Sometimes, even though I know every word, I can still not get the meaning. It seems that if I want to improve my listening ability, language is not the only enemy I have to fight against.

Other students say: Listening causes me a lot of headaches, and it becomes especially difficult when the topic are unfamiliar to me.

To solve these problems I design some tasks to develop the skills of listening based on the listening material. These trainings include making predictions before listening, grasping main idea sentences, key words and signal words while listening.

1．Make predictions

This means：①Students are given the topic and have to predict what will be said , then listen and cheek their predictions. For example, the listening material has a title of Festival in Britain. According to the topic some students may guess the material is about some festivals in Britain, some students may expect the shops situation on Festival and other students may think of how Englishmen celebrate their festival. The more different their expectation may be the stronger the desires for them to listen become.②students are asked to make predictions according to the exercises given to them .Ask students to have a quick look at exercises they are required to do before they listen. Thus they can get a lot of useful information about the listening material and become interested in it, It can also make them feel easier when they are listening. Again take Festival in Britain as an example .When finish reading all the exercises. Students may know the article which they are going to listen to is about how a fishing village in Britain celebrate their festival.

2．Grasp the topic sentences, key words and signal words.

Topic sentences tell you the main idea of a paragraph; Key words refer to those notional words in the passage. Getting them is good for you to understand the whole article. Signal words may be classified into several groups, but, however and yet express transition of an essay; first, second, then, finally indicate the order; because, as, for, as a result show the cause and result; indeed, in fact indicate emphasis.

During the teaching activities of training to grasp the topic sentences, information words and signal words, teachers should pay attention to the following things:

(1)Be clear about the emphasis of the training, according to the content of the material, the style and the feature of the listening material.

The students are not good at recognizing and seizing the emphasis of the listening material. They always want to make every word clear and remember all the words, while in fact they understand a little about the text. So it is very important for a teacher to help the students to get the emphasis.

In some listening text the first sentence of the last sentence may tell you the main idea of the whole passage.

When students listen to some dialogues, teachers may tell them to pay more attention to the answering sentences. Because in this kind of listening material the main idea may mostly be expressed in the form of answering questions. For example，there is a dialogue named whats wrong with the jeep．

Jackie：what was the jeep like?

Young Pei：Very cheap! Its second hand. Its about twelve years old and its not very good.

Jackie：Tell me more.

Yong Pei：First of all, one of the front lights doesnt work and the drovers window is broken.

Information words in some listening text are very clear. Teachers may put the emphasis on this point for students to train. For instance in the listening text of A Day in the life of a slave, there are many useful nouns and verbs which can help students understand the life of a slave in a day.

Signal words may tell you how the story of the listening text are organized and developed. So teachers may put the emphasis on this and let students to practise. Also I can give you an example: there is a listening text named learning English. In it these words such as, however, finally, first, second, then, so appear. They are very useful. Signal words are limited. So before training teachers can help students to identify them.

(2)Using all kinds of teaching means and methods to help students get the topic sentence, information words and signal words. For example teachers may pause when a topic sentence appear, and then repeat it, When I practice listening first I let students listen to the topic sentence twice and then ask them read aloud together, meanwhile, ask them to write it down .

When we practice listening. I put the whole listening text in the computer and present it before students, then we find and underline the key words. In this way they can know the emphasis of the listening text.

While we practice the listening text of learning English, I pause the recorder when a signal word appearing tell the students to pay attention to the change of the content.

However——(maybe the opposite information will occur)

First——(maybe the second, the third information will be followed)

So——(maybe the result will be told )

To achieve the better result for listening teaching, the training of listening techniques can't be carried out in isolation. It must be combined with other skills in that or this way.

（二）Combination of listening and speaking practices together

The main task of listening teaching is to help students to improve their ability of receiving and understanding information from the listening materials. While understanding and expressing are the two ways of communication, they can't be separated. Therefore in listening teaching teachers may ask students to do some kinds of speaking activities after they have finished listening. And the successful completion of such activities is built on the comprehension of listening text. The purpose is to consolidate what has been learned by the students. Now, let me give an example.

Smoking is part of my job

Down talks about her job.

Hello, my name is Dawn and I live on the west coast of Canada. I work on a fish farm.

Right now I'm feeding the fish, which are kept in cages in the sea. The cages are tied are to rocks on the bottom of the sea. It can get very windy here. Twice a day I put the fish food in the boat and go out to the cages. The fish are always hungry!

When the fish have grown to the right size, we pull the cages out of the water. The fish are killed and cleaned. Out fish farm is a long way from the nearest market. So we either freeze the fish or smoke them. We don't salt any fish here. Some fish farms do but we don't.

Three of us work here and there's always a lot to do. Inside that building over there we have tanks for the young fish. We produce all our own fish from eggs. The fish start to grow in fresh water. Then, when they are bigger they go into the sea, which is salty, of course.

There is always lots of work: feeding the fish, cleaning the tanks, getting the eggs out of the best of the large fish, harvesting the fish, cleaning them and smoking them. We have an old machine for smoking the fish. We burn our own wood and that way we get a very good strong smoke. Its more work, but we get higher prices for our smoked fish.

1．Questions before listening---This may be called pre-listening activity.

Teachers may design some questions and ask students to think about them, predict and then discuss in small groups. This kind of activity may encourage the co-operation among classmates and challenge the students creativity. In addition, pre-listening activities can warm students up and arouse their interest in listening.

Q1:What kind of job is "smoking"?

Q2:What will the passage tell us ?

2．Explanations after listening——This may be called while-listening activity.

Before students listen, teachers dont explain some difficult words expressions and sentences, but let the students guess the meaning according to the context. This activity can activate students' prior knowledge about the topic, not only in listening skill, but also in explaining in English.

The following words and expressions are hard for them to understand in the above listening text. After the students finish listening, the teachers ask some students to guess the meaning of them and encourage them to explain it in his own words. They are: have tanks, smoked fish, burn our own word, grow to the right size, the cages are tied to rocks, produce all our fish from eggs.

3．Answers after listening——This may be called post-listening activity.

（1）Answer the teachers questions according to the listening material.

（2）Ask and answer questions with each other according to the listening text.

Answering some questions after finishing listening can not only test the students' listening skills but also improve the students' poken English. Teachers may know how well the students understand the listening text. As the students have predicted what about"smoking".They have a lot to say when answering the questions. So this kind of training is good for them to communicate with each other, and helpful for them to communicate with the teacher. In this way students' poken English is also improved while they are listening. At this period of time, teachers may ask them these questions:

Q1:What kind of job is "smoking" n the passage?

Q2:Why do they smoke fish?

Q3:How far is their fish farm from the nearest market?

Q4: Where do they raise the fish?

Q5:Why do they have to tie the cages to rocks on the bottom of the sea?

Q6: Do the fish always live in the sea?

Q7: What do they have tanks for?

Q8: Where are the fish killed and cleaned?

Q9: How many of them work on the fish farm?

Q10: What job do they have to do every day?

4．Discussion after listening——This is also one of the past-listening activities.

Teacher may require the students to have some discussion on the topic or analyse the material in some different ways. In the above listening text, there are only three workers on the fish farm. So teachers may say, from the passage we know three workers. But there is so much work: feeding the fish, cleaning the tanks, getting eggs out of the best of the large fish, harvesting the fish, leaning them and smoking them. How can they do so much work?

So I give my students this discussion topic"How can they do so much work". They think deeply about it and then have a warm discussion. They talk about from the equipment on the fish farm to the management of the fish farm. It's really an interesting and successful discussion. This activity not only helps students to have a deep understanding about the listening text but also helps them express their own ideas with their own words.

For students, this kind of training is not the passive listening process ut gives them an equal chance to have some information communication. So they were happy to do this and they improved a lot.

（三）Combination of listening and writing practices together

In the new English textbook exercises which are designed for the students to do are new and varied . For instance, multiple-choice exercises, right or wrong exercises, filling in blanks exercises are a little hard for them to complete. So I tell students to take notes while listening. Note-taking is, in fact, a skill which combines listening and writing, because it requires the students to write down, either word for word or in his own words, what they consider important when listening, So I give my students some guidance in how to abbreviate words in order to write them as quickly as possible. For example, in notes we often write"&"instead of "and",and we shorten certain words in ways that we recognize them, such as "poss." For "possible", or "shd" for "should".We also tend to leave out definite and indefinite articles. I often remind my students, though, that when they come to write their notes out in full sentences, they should not use these abbreviations. Now I will give an example of how we use this method of combining listening and writing skills.

Sports

(A)

We collected 45.17. we organized a basketball competition. It wasn't a basketball match, though people had to stand and get as many baskets as they could. Some people were very good. One person got 20 baskets out of 20throws.

(B)

I organized a swimming event. It wasn't a competition people promised money to us swam up and down the pool as many tines as possible. One person swam up and down 228times. We collected 27.50.

(C)

We collected 52.05. We organized a cycling day. People cycled to as many different villages as they could. Our friends promised money for each village that we cycled to. It was a beautiful day too and we enjoyed our trips very much.

(D)

I organized a throwing match in a field in our village. Pairs of people threw a Frisbee from one to the other. The purpose was to see how far they could throw a Frisbee without dropping it. The record was 87 meters. We collected 50.00.

(E)

We organized a volleyball competition. Each team paid 1 to play and had to play against every other team. The winning team collected 6.00. We collected 10.00 for sports.

1．dictation before listening——This is also one of the pre-listening activities.

Have a dictation of some difficult words, expressions and sentences purposely before the real listening begins, which will help them to clear away obstacles that they may meet during listening. The following words and expression are a little difficult for students to listen: Frisbee, stand still, a swimming event. One person got 20 baskets out of 20 throws.

In addition, teachers may arrange on purpose for the students to dictate some words which have the similar pronunciation.

2．take notes while listening——This also can be called one of the while- istening activities.

Quite a few students can get the main idea of the listening text, but they often forget the beginning part when they are listening to the latter part. And also they can't remember the details of the text. So teachers should ask students to take notes while listening. That is to say: to train students to write down some key words. There are several sources for a student to rely on when he is trying to make an inference. One is intonation. A sentence, if produced with different types of intonation, can express totally different meanings. For instance, if a person says"close the door, please"withrising intonation, he may be making a polite request. But if he utters the same sentence with a falling intonation, he may be expressing annoyance or criticism of the other person's forgetting to close the door. Another source is the speaker's choice of words. If a speaker uses a lot of formal words, he is probably speaking in a formal situation, such as to his boss in the office. On the other hand, if most of his words are colloquial, he is likely to be chatting with someone he is familiar with, such as one of his friends in a bar.

The most common classroom activity carried out at this stage is answering questions, but in fact answering questions on what we heard is only one of many things we do with the information gained. Teachers might transfer the information to another context, such as filling details in a form, labeling a piece of graphic material, taking notes, or correcting something already written, There are other activities that can be carried out in the lesson, such as ticking off items in a list, drawing the picture or diagram, carrying out the actions, arranging events or information in the correct sequence, and so on. It is important that the teacher finds out if the students have fully comprehended the text and whether there have been any problems in doing so. These problems have to be dealt with, so that students can improve their listening efficiency, Remember that the teacher's purpose is to teach not to test!

3．writing practice after listening——This is also one of the post-listening activities.

Some writing exercises can be designed for students on the comprehension of listening text. The purpose of these exercise is to consolidate what has been learned they are listening, especially the words indict time, place, numbers and names, In connection with this listening text, teachers may ask the students to make on the three aspects:

A．What were the five sports?

B．What did people do in each sport?

C．How much money was collected in each sport?

The above questions give students some requests to listen. When he listens, he matches what he expects with what he hears and activates his knowledge about the language and background information to exact the meaning.Language and background knowledge constitute the two main sources of information the students can resort to in achieving understanding. In addition to the knowledge of language, the students also call on the knowledge of topic. The use of inside-the-head knowledge, that is, knowledge about the context, speaker or topic, which is not directly encoded in words, to work out the whole meaning first, is referred to as the top-down approach by the students, They can use the new information and language gained from their listening in a different context and connect it with the language they already have. So for example, if you have been using a listening text to draw students' attention to intonation patterns expressing certain attitudes, you would want them to use that information in a role-play in which they might have to express the same attitudes.

As I have been using the listening text to teach the students how to take notes, then in this period of the time, I should ask them to use those notes for some writing purpose, such as writing out their views on a problem and sorting their notes. Here is the example：

The function of sorting out their notes is to make full use of their memory about the listening text. It can recall the memory of some very important information which are lost during listening. During the course of sorting out data they in fact go over the listening text . This kind of activity is useful for students to understand more about the listening text which they have heard.

（四）The ways and steps of combining the three skills of training

The listening techniques, the combination of listening and speaking and the combination of listening and writing are the three parts of my English teaching methods, which is an integrated training system. I also divide the all-round comprehensive system into three stages. They are: prediction before listening; comprehensive understanding while listening; removing after listening. So the whole listening class can be divided into three stages; pre-listening, while-listening and post -listening stage.

The main purpose of the pre-listening stage is to introduce enough about the topic, type of text or purpose for listening in order to activate the students' schema and get them ready to predict what they will hear and make sense of it. The teacher could give the students the key words from the text and ask them to predict the content or topic of the text , or dictate them some new words or hard words and expressions to clear out their difficulty and this can warm students up and arouse their interest in listening.

What follows the pre-listening stage is the while-listening stage, the period in which students perform the act of listening. The most common classroom activity carried out at this stage are the following:(a)Find out the key words, signal words and topic sentence,(b)Cheek their own prediction with what they have heard. (c)Take notes of some important information to complete the exercises. (d)Complete most of the exercises they required to do; such as ticking off items in a list, drawing the picture or program, carrying out the actins, arranging events or information in the correct sequence, and so on. It is important that the teacher finds out if the students have fully comprehended the text and whether there have any problems in doing so. These problems have to be dealt with, so that students can improve their listening effective.

The last period of a listening class is the post-listening stage . In a number of teachers' mind, the post-listening stage is a period in which the teacher checks his students answers, and points out their problems or explains the listening text. These are all traditional activities frequently done in a listening class. They are not good enough for today's teaching. The purpose of this stage is to consolidate what has been learned by the students . As I have said before, I have been using the listening text to teach the students how to take notes for some writing or speaking purpose , such as explaining something to someone, or writing out their views on a problem. If new vocabulary has been learned from the listening activity, then it should be practiced at this stage in an activity that requires it. So if the text was about newspapers and the students learned such expressions as "daily", "weekly", "circulation" and "copy", then they could be encouraged to use those by writing about or discussing the most popular Chinese newspapers, especially if the teachers is able to provide them with the relevant circulation figures.

The whole process of a listening class can be explained in terms of a film shooting analogy. The teacher can be thought of as a "director" and the students "actors" and "actress". Before the shooting, the director gives the actor and the actresses an instruction of the play, tells them how they are expected to act and sometimes involves them in some kind of warm-up activities to get themselves ready for the shooting. When it comes to the actual shooting, the director will give the whole stage to the actors and actresses, whit him standing behind the scene, monitoring and observing. After the shooting, the director will get the actors and actresses together again, making comments or diagnosing problems.

Ⅱ Conclusion

After two and a half months practice in English teaching with these three skills together, I have achieved good results. Most of my students say they are not afraid of listening tasks any more and they feel they have improved a lot and became more and more interested in English. The reason may be concluded as follows:

1. The three skills of training listening techniques, the combination of listening and speaking and the combination of listening and writing change the one way input into multilateral communication, and thus make the students owner of the study course. Teachers is only a director.

2. The core of these training is listening, but it is combined with speaking and writing. So the basic three skills complement students ability of using the language freely

References：

[1]Practical Project Design．Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press，2001，7．

[2]English language Teaching Methodology．Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press，2000，7．

[3]顾日国．英语教学法．外语教学与研究出版社，2000．

[4]English for Studying．Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press，2000，7．

[5]English Language Teaching Methodology．Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press，2000，7．