A Study Of PBL Teaching Model On Enhancing College Students’ English Listening Comprehension

The teaching model of Project-based Learning (PBL) is a new model based on theConstructivism Theory. It is regarded as the most conspicuous reformation in educationalcircles during the last years. The shift emphasis in language teaching from a teacher-directedapproach to a learner-centered one, along with the perceived need to promote learners’ effortsat improving linguistic competence, has resulted in new challenges for language teachers. Todevelop learners’ autonomy and general academic skills have gone beyond the rationale oftraditional textbooks. PBL teaching model can not only put the teaching strategies intopractice by the various forms of projects, but also a researching process of meticulouslydesigned assignments by using the factors of learning environment, such as scenes,cooperation, conversations etc.With the aid of various resources to get information and communicate with others, thisthesis constructs a model of college English PBL to cultivate college students’ Englishlistening comprehension. It is a type of teacher-guided and student-centered model. Studentscan accomplish project assignments through cooperation and autonomous learning underteacher’s guiding and they can master contents of teaching program during the constructionalprocess.The mode of PBL originated in European Labor educational ideology. The earliest formwas the European education of job for study from the18thcentury and Americanco-operational education from the19thcentury. It is being perfected gradually in the mid-laterperiod of the20thcentury and becomes an important theoretical trend. PBL has been widelyused in the second language and foreign teaching abroad for20years. Its influences onlanguage learning are mainly embodied in the following aspects:1) the promotion of students’learning motivation, interest, confidence and autonomy，2) the cultivation of students’ solvingability and critical thinking ability，3) the assistance of language input and output，4) thecultivation of language learning skills and strategies, etc. But according to literatureinvestigation, in our country, the applied research for PBL in the college English teaching isstill for the start-up stage; and it is much fewer studies of PBL constructing students’ Englishlistening comprehension. The author is willing to make further research.Based on the theories of Constructivism, Cooperative Learning and AutonomousLearning, this research is designed to discover whether the PBL teaching model can enhancestudents’ listening comprehension. The subjects of the study are students of two classes in apolytechnic university. For one class, traditional teaching model was used; the other class is the experimental class, whose students used their mastered knowledge to plan and accomplishthe projects according to the English teacher’s elaborately designed demand. Before theexperiment, the same questionnaires and pre-test were used in two classes in order to learnabout students’ learning situation. After a period of teaching, a post-test was used to checktheir learning results. As a measure of supplement, interview was also used to help explain theresults in the experimental class.This thesis consists of five chapters. In Chapter One, a general idea about the study isintroduced, concerning the research motivation and the purpose, as well as the whole structureof the thesis. Chapter Two is theoretical framework and literature review. The theories that areused to support the research are presented in this part. Besides, some relative teaching modeltheories and listening learning are also introduced. Chapter Three is the research design,which covers the research questions, the subjects chosen to participate in the research, theinstruments to be used for the experiment, the whole process of the study and data collection.Chapter Four is the main part of the thesis with the analysis and discussion of the experimentresult. The last chapter is conclusion, which concludes the major findings of the whole thesis,significance of the research, limitations of the research and suggestions for further research.The result of the study indicates the experimental class and control class havesignificantly different results. Therefore, the conclusion could be reached that the PBLteaching model could enhance students’ listening comprehension ability. The results obtainedfrom the experiment are expected to offer referred teaching model for teachers to improvecollege English teaching quality and accomplish teaching assignment better.Students’ learning abilities are different from each other, so maybe the study is notadaptable to all of the students. In this thesis, it shows the limitations for the study andpropounds the suggestions for further research.