Explore The Role Of Reciting To Improve The Rural Junior Middle School Students' English Listening Ability

Listening is one of the five basic skills in foreign language learning. Generally speaking, junior high pupils'listening ability is poorer than other abilities. Therefore, how to improve students'English listening is a question which every English teacher should ponder. Listening comprehension ability involves comprehensive skills. At present students'main problems that affect listening include:too small a vocabulary size, difficulty in speech recognition, poor understanding of words in context, lack of Western cultural knowledge, and so on. This thesis aims to study the utilization of reciting to enhance students'listening ability. The study is based on Krashen's Input Hypothesis, and explore how to use reciting in daily teaching, through comparison and investigation of two classes to find out whether reciting can help enhances junior middle school students'listening ability and provides a model for middle school teachers of English.To achieve the purpose, the author uses a questionnaire survey and teaching experiment with two classes of the eighth grade, English listening test and interview. Experiments are arranged as follows:two classes do listening aptitude test in the beginning of the semester, and at the end of the semester do another test. Apart from that, questionnaire survey is carried out in both classes to find the result of the experiment.This thesis provides a new model of listening by emphasizing imitating pronunciation and reciting the materials beforehand concerning the content of listening to be done, such as key words, useful phrases, grammatical patterns and some well-chosen extracts, etc. As reciting is enables students to improve sound recognition, enlarges their vocabulary size, has a better grasp of grammar and raises their ability of oral communication, the experiment produces a positive result. Those students involved in the experiment with reciting do better than those without such practice.Based on the research, we can come to a conclusion that reciting is a useful and effective method in improving students'listening ability. If the materials for reciting are appropriately chosen and carefully used by teachers, they can certainly help improve students'listening and other skills as well.