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essay范文-teaching English listening-英语听力论文，英语听力教学论文，teaching practice has found that listening skill 1. Introduction
1.1 Introduction
Nowadays, the requirement for workers' English speaking proficiency is rising. The changes to the demands of ILETS, TOFEL Examination etc make listening more and more important all over the world. Besides, the communicative approach is on the rise for students since Beijing Olympic Games. The need for ability in listening in English learners is increasingly accepted, so that more and more people begin to get attention with study of English listening.
如今,要求英语熟练工人正在上升。这些变化将会ILETS需求,托福考试等使听力越来越重要的世界各地。另外,交际法在上升,为学生自北京奥运会。需要能力英语学习者听力逐渐的被接受,使越来越多的人开始重视英语学习的听。essay
1.2 Problem statement
So far, significant reflection on ESL teaching practice has found that listening skill is still the weak link in the language teaching and learing process. Although students have mastered the basic components of English grammar and vocabulary, their listening is still weak. The key factor that has been found in the prior studies is students’ limited listening comprehension.
Listening comprehension is generally considered as the most difficult skill by most learners. In China, there are learners who studies English for 8 years -- from Age 12 to Age 20, but many of them “who meet native speakers still find themselves unprepared for a variety of accents” (Cortazzi & JIN, 2006), they cannot understand English if it is spoken at a original and normal speed. They are not confident in their language ability because there are some factors influencing their learning on listening performance. The reason that causes students’ poor listening is complex: it may because of students’ affective elements and traditional teaching approaches.
Therefore, this study will attempt to investigate the factors that influence listening in ESL teaching and learning process of China and give some recommendation about how to improve listening skills based on the effect factors.
1.3 The purpose of research
The major purpose of this research paper is using questionnaire and interview to find out the influening factors on listening performance of English study and give some suggestions for teachers to help students improve learning skills, which will benefit them beyond classroom settings.
1.4 Research questions
The following research questions led the study:
Why listening is important to ESL teaching and learning process?
What are the facts of listening teaching and learning process in Secondary School of China?
What are the factors influence listening in ESL process?
How to improve listening skills in ESL process?
1.5 Hypothesis
The reason that causes students’ poor listening is complex: it may because of students’ affective elements and traditional teaching approaches.#p#分页标题#e#
Some learners may have psychological obstacles, lackness of language and cultural knowledge and bad habits in English listening process. On the other hand, many teachers may not take attention about the current situation in the course of teaching, which results in poor performance of students’ listening.
1.6 Rational for the research
Most Chinese secondary schools provide scores of introductions in vocabulary, reading, grammar and ways of scoring high marks in the National Entrance College Examination (NECE) while listening is of minor importance.
Besides, listening is the foundation of understanding and speaking. The communicative approach is on the rise for English learners. The need for ability in listening in English learners is increasingly recognized. So that is the pivotal issue and the important view in this paper from analyzing the influening factors for students’ listening comprehension to provide the essential necessities for teachers to make some improvement on their teaching strategies.
1.7 Definition of terms
The following are the key terms in the problem or question that are not clear and thus need to be defined:
Learning
Learning is acquiring new knowledge, behaviours, skills, values, preferences or understanding, and may involve synthesizing different types of information. The ability to learn is possessed by humans, animals and some machines. Progress over time tends to follow learning curves.
Human learning may occur as part of education or personal development. It may be goal-oriented and may be aided by motivation. The study of how learning occurs is part of neurophysiology, educational psychology, learning theory, and pedagogy.
Learning may occur as a result of habituation or classical conditioning, seen in many animal species, or as a result of more complex activities such as play, seen only in relatively intelligent animals and humans. Learning may occur consciously or without conscious awareness. There is evidence for human behavioral learning prenatally, in which habituation has been observed as early as 32 weeks into gestation, indicating that the central nervous system is sufficiently developed and primed for learning and memory to occur very early on in development.
Language Acquisition and Language Learning
'Acquisition' is the product of a subconscious process very similar to the process children undergo when they acquire their first language. 'Learning' is the product of formal instruction and it comprises a conscious process, which results in conscious knowledge 'about' the language, for example knowledge of grammar rules (Krashen, 2005: 2-3).
First or Native Language (L1)
The language a child learns from infancy. Many children learn more than one language from birth and may be said to have more than one 'First' language.
Second Language (L2)
In this research paper the term refers to any language other than the first language learned. For this reason, second (L2) or foreign language (FL) will be used with the same meaning.#p#分页标题#e#
ESL
ESL (English as a second language), ESOL (English for speakers of other languages), and EFL (English as a foreign language) all refer to the use or study of English by speakers with a different native language.
English as a Second Language (ESL) Learners and Teachers
English as a Second Language (ESL) Learners and Teachers: are those who are learning and teaching English while living in a community where English is spoken as a second language.
Case study
A piece of work that is done to find out more about a particular subject or problem, and usually includes written report. (Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English 2005)
Population
It is a group of individuals who have the same characteristic. (John W. Creswell, 2005)
In this research, the population is the subjects selected in doing this study and they are secondary school students and teachers in China.
Sample
A sample is a sub-group of the target population that the researcher plans to study or generalizing about the target population. (John W. Creswell, 2005)
Qualitative research
This kind of research describes phenomena in words instead of numbers or measures (Krathwohl 1993). In addition from Smith (2000), this research is based on the notion of context sensitivity, the belief that the particular physical and social environment have a great bearing on human behaviour.
Quantitative research
It refers to the research that describes phenomena in numbers and measures instead of words (Krathwohl 1993). Furthermore from Smith (2000), quantitative research looks for more context-free generalizations.
2. literature review
2.1 Introduction
L2 researchers have investigated many of the obstacles that impact receivers' L2 comprehension. The obstacles include three main aspects: listener factors, speaker factors and text factors.
Research on listener factors (Boyle, Faerch and Kasper, Sheils, Rost, Goh) identified many factors influences on ESL listening comprehension. These include: linguistic ability, ability to guess the meaning of unfamiliar terms, ability to use verbal and non verbal strategies to compensate for gaps in linguistic ability, ability to infer meaning, ability to take notes, failure to understand the main points and logical argument. In their study on the problems facing L2 students lecture comprehension, Flowerdew and Miller pointed out difficulty in concentration and maintaining concentration for a long time. This claim is supported by Underwood who stated that inability to concentrate "is a major problem because even the shortest break in attention can seriously impair comprehension." Goh reported learners' difficulty in perception: students got problems about recognizing familiar words. They mentioned that even though they were familiar with several words, they cannot remember their meaning immediately. They also stated difficulty in understanding the intended information though they were familiar with the words' literal meaning. Also expressed were problems about dealing with the content of the information conveyed by the speaker because of the prior knowledge lack.#p#分页标题#e#
This literature review discuss the importance of listening, the process of listening comprehension, strategies of listening comprehension, and causal analysis of listening comprehension problems.
2.2 Related literature
2.21 The process of listening comprehension
It is difficult to describe listening because listening is an invisible mental process. However, it is recognised by Wipf (1984) that listeners must discriminate between sounds, understand vocabulary and grammatical structures, interpret stress and intonation, understand intention and retain and interpret this within the immediate as well as the larger socio-cultural context of the utterance. Rost (2002) defines listening, in its broadest sense, as a process of receiving what the speaker actually says (receptive orientation); constructing and representing meaning (constructive orientation); negotiating meaning with the speaker and responding (collaborative orientation); and, creating meaning through involvement, imagination and empathy (transformative orientation).
Thus, listening is a complex, active processes of interpretation in which listeners match what they hear with what they already know.
2.22 The importance of listening
Listening is an important component of the communication process. Much of what students learn is acquired by means of listening. Listening, therefore, is an important skill in language learning.
According to Feyten (1991), of the total time people spend on communication, 45% is on listening, 30% on speaking, 16% on reading, and 9% on writing. Among the four skills, listening is the language skill which usually develops faster than speaking and which affects the development of reading and writing abilities in learning a new language (Scarcella & Oxford, 1992; Vandergrift, 1997). It is also the most frequently used skill in the classroom and in daily life (Yang, 1996). Vandergrift (1997) claimed that listening internalized not only the rules of language but also facilitated the emergence of other language skills.
Therefore, an analysis about the influencing factors for students’ listening comprehension could help understand the process of listening as well as offer the essential necessities for teachers and students to make some improvement on ESL teaching and learning process.
Rost (1997) also pinpointed the importance of listening in the language classroom as the supplier of supplied the input for students. In brief, without comprehensible stimulation at the appropriate level, learning is unable to come about. Hence, listening is a fundamental and vital skill in the acquisition of languages (Nunan, 2002).
2.23 Strategies of listening comprehension
Listening strategies are skills that contribute directly to the comprehension. Listening strategies can be sorted by how the listener deals with the information.
Top-down strategies are listener based; the listener taps into background knowledge of the topic, the situation or context, the type of text, and the language. This background knowledge activates a set of expectations that help the listener to interpret what is heard and anticipate what will come next.#p#分页标题#e#
essay范文-teaching English listening-英语听力论文，英语听力教学论文，teaching practice has found that listening skillTop-down strategies include:
• listening for the main idea
• predicting
• drawing inferences
• summarizing
Bottom-up strategies are text based in which the listener relies on the language in the message, that is, the combination of sounds, words, and grammar that creates meaning. Bottom-up strategies include:
• listening for specific details
• recognizing cognates
• recognizing word-order patterns
Listening comprehension is an synergistic, interpretive process in which listeners use prior knowledge and linguistic knowledge in understanding information.
Listeners use meta-cognitive, cognitive and socio-affective strategies to facilitate comprehension and to make their learning more effective. Metacognitive strategies are important because they regulate and direct the language learning process. Research shows that skilled listeners use more metacognitive strategies than their less-skilled counterparts (O'Malley & Chamot, 1990, Vandergrift, 1997a). The use of cognitive strategies helps students to handle learning datas and use specific skills to a listening task. Socio-affective strategies describe the skills listeners use to cooperate with others, to verify understanding or to lower anxiety.
2.24 Causal analysis of listening comprehension problems
Listening comprehension is a complex psychological course of listeners’ understanding language by sense of hearing. It is an synergistic process of language cognition and psychological activities.
However, this process is not just decoding the information; it also involves the combining of the decoding of the information process with its reconstruction as meaning (Ma Lihua, 2002).
Students’ psychological obstacles influence their listening capacity
Psychological factors refer to those non-mental factors not directly involving cognitive processes, such as students interests, attention, learning emotions, attitudes, and willpower. Although these non-mental factors are directly influential in the students learning processes, they play a part in promoting and controlling learning effectiveness. For example, two students' listening levels might be similar, and, while their test results may be quite different, the explanation for their difference is seen to lie in their different psychological states.
The cultural attitude of students is especially influential in the way that students address their studies. In China, there is a long history of reverence for written text, and this attitude has influenced the official assessment processes. Thus students usually do not pay much attention on developing listening comprehension because they think it takes a lower percentage of marks in exams, but reading and writing get more rewards. Students know that they can get high scores only if they master the prescribed skills of grammar and writing. In addition, listening comprehension seems to have less practical value than other parts of English for students because they never use it in real life. As a result, these psychological factors have a direct influence on students’ motivation and commitment to listening study.#p#分页标题#e#
As a direct outcome of the factors mentioned above, many Chinese students do not have confidence in their listening and speaking English language capability and they always have a self-defeating and negative attitude to their engagement in it. In the listening classroom, teachers need students’ active involvement but, having so many students who have no confidence and feel nervous, makes the taskwork of generating commication and conversation particularly very difficult. Students are not willing to answer questions and afraid of being laughed at by other classmates. When taking examinations the tension of being criticized by the teacher and parents is usually more than students will tolerate. Thus, it is not surprising that secondary school students who are under stress for a considerable period of time are often depressed; factors that compound their endeavors to make their English proficiency higher.
b. Grammar knowledge affects listening comprehension
Language knowledge is the foundation of learning English. If students’ knowledge of pronunciation, grammar, and vocabulary is insufficient, it is probable that their English listening comprehension will be negatively affected by lack of language knowledge.
However, the most basic outward shell of language is pronunciation and intonation. Hence, the first procedure of listening comprehension is learning how to recognize and choose sound signals according to pronunciation; so pronunciation knowledge must be improved. While students’ pronunciation knowledge is insufficient, their ability to discriminate will be poor and will influence listening comprehension.
For the Chinese student of English the challenge of listening poses particular demands because there are many sentence types that are complex and very different from the home language. If the student is unable to distinguish the main clause from a subordinate clause and is unable to understand their relationships, despite understanding the meaning of every word in the sentence, understanding is unlikely to occur with accuracy. Students do become accustomed to analysing grammatical structure relatively quickly when they are taught the psychological analysis method. Anyway, many students feel confused about relationships in a sentence and connections between sentences and they are usually not sure about relationship within sentences. Thus poor grammatical knowledge could make English listening levels lower.
c. Cultural background knowledge and thinking affect listening comprehension
According to Trudgill (1983) language is rather like a mirror that reflects the national culture of its speakers. The American linguist Sapir (1921: 60-90) maintains that, “Language cannot exist without culture…Culture can be explained as what the society thinks and does, and the language is the expression of the ideas of the society.” Thereby, the relationship between language and culture is indivisible; language is the carrier of culture and a way of thinking.#p#分页标题#e#essay范文-teaching English listening-英语听力论文，英语听力教学论文，teaching practice has found that listening skill
Language holds knowledge and cultural data and it reflects the special ways of people's thinking. Thus culture is embedded in even the simplest act of language (Liddicoat, 2000), it is an inseparable part of the way in which we live our lives and the way we use language.. As found by O’Malley and Chamot (1989), the effective listener was the one who was able to draw on a knowledge of the world, on personal experiences and by asking questions of themselves.
Therefore, the student with no background knowledge of culture in English, American or other English speaking countries, is unlikely to understand Anglophone modes of thinking as expressed in English language. Kramsch (1993) maintains that every time we speak we perform a cultural act. Therefore, there is an significant in language teaching on cultural acquirement as a foundation for language learning. An important prerequisite for learning listening English, is the understanding of cultural knowledge. Consequently, if students’ pronunciation, grammar, vocabulary and cultural knowledge are all very good, they must be mastered in a sound knowledge of the society in which the language is based.
3. Methodology
3.1 Introduction
Through interviewing and questionnaire, I got the data from No.8 Secondary School in Beijing. After analyzing the data, I discussed the factors influencing listening in ESL teaching and learning process and provide some suggestions for both students and teachers.
3.2 Research Design
The selected research design is mixed methods design, which is a procedure for collecting, analyzing, and "mixing" both quantitative and quantitative data in a single study to understand a research problem. It is a "legitimate inquiry approach" (Brewer & Hunter, 1989, P28). The questionnaire is for students and interview is for teachers. It is a case study in No.8 Secondary School of Beijing. This design has chosen because it really suits with how the study is carried out.
3.3 Research Population
For the questionnaire, the population is students from No. 8 Secondary School of Beijing in China.
About the interview, the population is teachers from No. 8 Secondary School of Beijing in China.
3.4 Research Sample
For questionnaire, researcher randomly selected 30 students from No. 8 Secondary School of Beijing in China. It is under the probability sampling of quantitative sampling strategy, which is simple random sampling -- the researcher selects participants for the sample so that any individual has an equal probability of being selected from the population.
For interview, researcher purposely selected 3 English teachers from No. 8 Secondary School of Beijing in China.
3.5 Research Instrument
Questionnaire form:
The instruments in the study comprise two parts: questionnaires and interview protocol. The first questionnaire is a structured questionnaire with 16 statements about factors influencing listening in a five-frequency scale, from 1 (I strongly disagree) to 5 ( I strongly agree) to assess how true the statement is. The data were tested and found to reach the requirements of reliability (See Appendix 1).#p#分页标题#e#
essay范文-teaching English listening-英语听力论文，英语听力教学论文，teaching practice has found that listening skillI required the students to give their answer according to their first thought. And the most important thing I did to keep my data accurate was that I admit students to finish it without writing down his or her name. What I want to get is just the accurate data.
b. Interview protocol
The interview protocol includes 10 main questions centering on the factors about teachers' view of listening ESL process. The data were employed to analyze or support the findings of the research (See Appendix 2).
3.6 Pilot Study
The researcher distributed the questionnaire form to 10 students from Class 2 Form 5 in No. 8 Secondary School of Beijing in China and gave interview protocolto to another 2 teachers to get feedback about the questions, then revise the survey based on the written comments.
3.7 Data Collection Procedure
About the questionnaire, researcher followed the procedure of searching information, constructing the questionaire, inviting the paticipants, e-mailing the questionaire, waiting for response, asking back the completed questionaire.
The interview data was collected by a conversation with the chosen teachers according to 10 main questions. Researcher followed the procedure of searching information, constructing the questions, inviting the participants, making apointment, interviewing in the telephone, recording.
3.8 Data Analysis Procedure
The researcher analysed questionnaire data by using descriptive statistics. The procedure include input data, summed score method to analyze data, report by using tables and summary of the major results.
Researcher analysed interview data by the procedure of making transcription of the interview, summarizing the main points of the interview and decoding the utterance.
Reference
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Krashen, Stephen D. Second Language Acquisition and Second Language Learning. Prentice-Hall International, 2005.
Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English 2005
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learning
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ESL
Appendix 1
Questionnaire:
1. I have limited vocabulary.
2. I cannot comprehend speech delivered at faster rates of speed.
3. I cannot remember words or phrases I have just heard.
4. I cannot divide streams of speech into words or parts of a sentence.
5. I lack in concentration.
6. I miss the next part when thinking about incomprehensible words or phrases.
7. I can perceive the speech just in fragments.
8. I cannot distinguish important points.
9. I pay attention to details and do not get the overall context.
10. I translate each word into Chinese.
11. I cannot understand what is spoken about at all.
12. I do not recognize sounds of words which I know in writing.
13. I cannot process English input as quickly as needed.
14. I have little prior knowledge about the content.
15. I have little interest in the content.
16. I lack grammar knowledge.
Appendix 2
Interview protocol:
What is your opinion on teaching English listening?
What do you think about the facts of listening teaching and learning process in Secondary School of China?
What approaches do you usually use during the listening lessons?
What is your point of view about the traditional listening teaching approaches? Could you please explain about the strengths and weaknesses?
Do you think students' affectives can influence their listening? If yes/no, why?
Do you think students have psychological obstacles in English listening process? If yes/no, please explain.
Do you think students have lack of language and cultural knowledge in English listening process? If yes/no, please provide example.
Do you think students' bad habits can influence English listening outcome? Could you please provide details?
Based on your acknowledge, what are other factors influence listening in ESL process?
Could you give some suggestions on how to improve listening skills in ESL process?
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