| According to the Senior English teaching course curriculum drawn by the Ministry of Education (2003), the goal in the basic education period is to develop students'ability to use the language in various ways. At present, most students in China receive a systematic English instruction when they are in the middle school, during which period, the students develop their listening, speaking, reading and writing skills. Among these skills, listening is the core of everyday communicative activities,and is one of the important ways to achieve the comprehensible input (Krashen, 1981, from Su Yuanlian, 2002.3:8—12) , but unfortunately, listening is also the poorest.Computer-Assisted Language Learning (CALL) is a subject tied tightly to other areas of study within applied linguistics such as autonomy and other branches of knowledge such as computer science; its development is in keeping with the progress of computer technology and the developing theories of applied linguistics. CALL is a new teaching and learning method. That is, teachers use computers to help teaching.CALL has more than 40 years'history. During this period, opinions of language teaching changed from behavioristic CALL to cognitivistic CALL, then to communicative CALL. According to this, Warschauer and Healey divided the development of CALL into three periods (1) Behavioristic CALL (2) Communicative CALL (3) Integrative CALL.At present, in China, most English teachers are used to using some traditional teaching equipment, such as blackboard, chalk, tape recorders etc. Recently most middle schools are equipped with computers, and teachers and students can get onto the internet at any moment. What's more, the teachers even can give online teaching. Many experts have studied the application of CALL, as well as its development. Levy Michael also defined it as"the research for and study of applications of the computer in language teaching and learning". (Levy Michael, 1997)With the wider usage of education technology, CALL is considered an effective way to promote language learning because of its specific features. How to combine CALL and listening teaching appropriately? It is an urgent problem to be solved. This thesis combines the two things. We hope to stimulate students' interests to improve listening through CALL.To overview the use of listening teaching and computer—assisted instruments in the present middle school, we can identify such following problems:1. For the use of multimedia, schools only stress the form, not the substance. The teachers only pay attention to the gorgeous appearance of courseware, not the content. Many teachers even make courseware become the chief part, and ignore its assisted position.2. Because teachers often have to attend to too many classes in a limited time in senior middle schools, they always stress reading and writing, and ignore listening and speaking, because the latter occupy only a small part in the exams.3. Listening teaching can not be given according to students'situation, and many teachers fail to take good advantage of multimedia's assistance. If we make good use of CALL, we can improve student's listening ability more efficiently.In order to solve the problems, this thesis discusses CALL through five parts.Chapter one gives the literature view. Chapter two is about some theoretical supports; chapter three confirms the theory through an experimental research. And after the theoretical and experimental demonstration, the author gives some major findings in Chapter four. Finally, I draw some conclusion as part five.The study chose 85 middle school students of Grade Two of No.11 Senior High School in Qingdao as subjects to take the test. The data are analyzed to find out the significance of CALL in English listening teaching. According to the results of the experiments, we get the following conclusion: CALL is useful for English listening learning, and we suggest that teachers make good use of computers, multimedia to promote students'listening level.
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