A Study Of Improving Senior Students' Listening Ability Of English Through Audiovisual Method

Listening, speaking, reading and writing are four basic skills as well as the main purpose of English teaching in high schools, in which listening lays the foundation to obtain the verbal message and plays an important role in oral communication. In recent years there has been a gradual reformation in college entrance examination in English, emphasis is put on the ability of using the language rather than acquiring only language knowledge.There has risen a tendancy towards the improvement of listening and reading ability of students. But for most middle school students, among listening, speaking, reading and writing skills, listening is the most difficult one. in other words, it is their common weakness. However we discovered in the teaching practice that the listening training has also been very weak in language teaching, some students are not only bored with listening course,but also afraid of engaging in listening tests.The traditional way of listening training goes on in the ordinary classroom, the teaching auxiliary aids are only furnished with the blackboard, the chalk, the picture, the tape recorder, the models and so on.in a period of teaching time, the teacher mainly gives a lecture, the students listen to it and take the notes, the teaching procedure goes like this: the teacher uses a recorder,and the students listen to it and do exercises,finally they check the answers.Can we break through this traditional pattern of listening teaching? How can we change the boring traditional way of teaching by using multimedia and modern teaching methods? In this case we might activate the students' enthusiasm, establish an effective environment of English listening teaching, where the class activities become interesting, students study actively and the English class turns to be lively. Looking over the pedagogy in SLT. the researcher selects the language teaching approach-- Audiovisual Method, because it is one which makes every effort to merge the teaching stuff, the teaching activity and the teaching techniques into a whole organic educational model. Its rationale is established on the present linguistics and the psychology foundation. It is one kind of method which takes the teaching auxiliary means into account and use audiovisual medias as the main teaching form in the teaching process.This method was developed in the fifties in France at the Centre de Recherche et d'Etude pour la diffusion du Francais(CREDIF) by a team directed by Cuberina and Rivenc. It has attempted to place language learning into a simplified social context and to teach language from the outset as meaningful spoken communication (Stern.1999;466).Audiovisual method takes language teaching process as one of stimulating -responding-consolidating. A stimulus of sound and vision makes students respond by imitating teachers doing repetitions to make drills so as to form the automated habits of students.Based on this, this study applies Audiovisual Method to English listening teaching of senior middle school, so as to promote the students' listening ability. The researcher used audiovisual method in classroom listening teaching to change the traditional way i.e. a procedure of listening to the tapes, listening to the teacher and classmates. With the aid of modern teaching equipment, we give full play to the role of multimedia, so as to enrich our lessons to mobilize students' active participation, and arouse the students' interest and faith to gain knowledge, all in all we try our best to improve the effect of classroom teaching. Eventually we combine listening ability training with other skills, in which the cultivation of listening skills may promote the improvement of other skills and at last aim at improving teaching quality.In order to discuss and study these problems, the researcher picked up Jingzhou Nanmen Middle School as an experimental area, choosing two classes of the same level in Senior I,2010, the researcher teaches the experimental class using audiovisual method, another teacher teaches the regular one adopting the traditional method, the practice goes on in the listening class for a semester applying audiovisual method to the teaching experiments, the researcher does the questionnaire, holds two listening tests. After the experiment, all the results of the tests (pretest and posttest) figures, the Questionnaire for evaluating the teaching of audio-visual method, are analyzed through SPSS11.0 (Statistical Package for the Social Science). We find out that after a semester's teaching, students of experimental class scores significantly better in listening quiz than the regular one.Thus it has tested my hypothesis,ie. in dealing with two classes of nearly the same degree,if we use the audiovisual method to teach listening in the experimental class and the traditional method in the regular class after a period of time, the scores the experimental class achieve are higher than those of the regular class, in addition, during our practice of listening class, audiovisual method have also received recognition and praise, students can actively participate in teacher's task, teacher-student interaction has increased. This also proves that this method can benefit from a variety of modern resources, it can stimulate students' interest and create a good environment for language with the aid of audio-visual integration, which is excellent in improving listening and speaking ability of students.From above we draw a conclusion that through the audiovisual method we can effectively promote the English listening ability of senior high school students. This conclusion has the realistic and practical significance in the fields such as:teaching research for secondary school, the assessment of teaching and professional development of teachers. We have evidence of such a teaching concept:when dealing with considerable levels of two classes,different teachers have different teaching methods, but the teaching effect is quite different; we determine such a belief:there are not students who are bad, there are only unsuitable methods which we choose for them. Teachers should continue to study teaching methods, teachers should make their efforts to do research and do innovative things, so that students and parents might trust them, and the people might be satisfied with them.