On A Strategy To Improve Middle School Students' Listening Comprehension

Listening is an important part of English teaching in senior middle school. It has been paid wide attention to since 2001, when listening was regarded as an important part of national entrance examination. However the traditional listening classroom seems to have failed to help learners become effective and successful listeners both in and out of the classroom. Many learners have associated listening courses with pain and boredom and often complain that they benefit little from listening lessons. That explains to some extent why many learners' listening ability stagnates and remains at elementary level although their other skills like reading, writing are advancing steadily.This thesis intends to explore the listening strategy of "Taking Notes While Listening" and its possible efficiency. Linking to task-based teaching strategy, the thesis puts forward two research questions: 1) Does note-taking while listening work in improving learners' English listening comprehension? 2) Does this strategy work in improving learners' English writing?The thesis begins with a theoretical analysis of the nature of listening comprehension and the notion of task-based language learning/teaching. Many listening strategies have been presented and a lot of literature is found in the field. The related research paves the way of the present research. Based on the recent development of listening comprehension theories and tasked-based language learning/teaching theories, together with close observation on learners' listening, the thesis proposes its position: taking notes while listening can not only improve the learners' listening ability, but also can develop learners' real communication. Because by doing this, listeners are not just "tape-recorder". Their attention is focused on meaning rather than linguistic structure.The present research adopts an experimental method to prove the assumptions. The participants consisted of 224 students of intermediate level classes of Senior 2 of Liantang No.2 Middle School in Nanchang County of Jiangxi province. The experiment group was made up of 56 students, and the others of the participants made...