An Application Of Context In Teaching Listening To College English

Abstract: Listening is one of the most difficult skills in English learning. As an input skill, listening comprehension is the basis for students to develop other lingual skills. Listening competence figures as an essential measure in examining a foreign language leaner's overall linguistic sense and communicative competence. However, many teachers are puzzled at the situation in the listening class: after listening, the students can only get some words and sentences without organizing them into a complete or meaningful passage, they can't encode the information they have heard. In order to solve these problems, the author, based on the theories about teaching listening and context, has made an investigation into the common obstacles while the students are listening to some materials and discussed how to improve their listening ability through contextual clues.Listening is an active psychological process of catching verbal meaning in the communication. There are three interrelated and recursive mental processes: perceptual processing, parsing and utilization (Anderson, 1985). Traditionally, the procedure of the listening comprehension is divided into two models: bottom-up model and top-down model. In the bottom-up processing, listeners focus on the sounds, words, intonation and grammatical structures. In the top-down processing, the listeners make good use of their prior knowledge and background knowledge to interpret the spoken discourse (Greene and Hicks, 1984: 14). Anyhow, in actual listening practice, students usually use both top-down and bottom-up models, which is the third model "Interactive Model" (Rumelhart, 1980).From the listening models, especially the latter two, we can see that context is essential to listening comprehension. Context, which refers to language environment, is the basis of language communication. Malinowski first proposed the concept of "context" in 1923. According to Numan (1993), context can be divided into linguistic context and non-linguistic context. The former refers to the co-text including the phonological context, the lexical context, the grammatical context, and the verbal context. The latter includes situational context and cultural context. In the history of FLT teaching, context has played an important role .Practically speaking, Context has two major functions: restrictions and interpretation. The roles of the context in determining the speaker's language selected as appropriate to the context will be termed as selectional restrictions; the roles of the context in supporting the hearer's inference of what the speaker relays will be termed as interpretation.As far as classroom procedures are concerned, the teaching of listening generally follows three stages: pre-listening, while-listening and post-listening. Pre-listening stage is to motivate students, activate their schema, to add context, prepared them for necessary language so that actual listening itself becomes easier. During while-listening stage, by providing a variety of types of tasks, students learn to listen for a variety of purposes which better prepare them for listening in the real world outside the classroom. During post-listening stage, listening tasks are integrated with speaking and writing so as to keep students' motivation. The detailed interpretation of the three processes and models as well as the stages of listening comprehension illustrates that listening comprehension is a complex active process. For such a complicated and demanding process, listeners should have a good command of both linguistic knowledge and background knowledge. Nevertheless, the true situation in China is far from satisfactory. There are some problems, to certain extent, with teachers, students as well as the teaching arrangement and listening materials.In order to improve students' listening comprehension, the author has designed the Questionnaire for the Obstacles in the Learning of English Listening and performed an investigation participated by some students in Xihua University. Seen from the data, the obstacles mainly lie in two aspects: Linguistic factors: the knowledge of English pronunciation, vocabulary and grammar. Non-linguistic factors: psychological factors, listening skills and strategies, background knowledge and so on.How to connect context with college English teaching so as to eliminate the obstacles in students' listening comprehension? The author puts forward that the language teachers should set off from improving college students' listening ability with the help of the linguistic as well as non-linguistic context, so as to let students learn to use contextual factors during the whole listening comprehension.