The Application Of Experiential Learning To The English Listening Instructioil For The Rural Senior High Schools

Listening comprehension is an actively complicated cognition, a process of verbal communication and one of the four macro-skills in language learning. It makes up of45%of the verbal communication activities in our daily, so it is one of the very important parts of the English teaching in senior high schools. More and more importance is attached to the English listening. The significance of the English communicative abilities (English listening included) is quite clearly stated in our national Standard English Curriculum. However, due to the deficiency in either the teaching conditions and the quality of teachers and because of the poor level of the rural students and the high pressure of the Entrance Examination, most teachers in the rural schools still exercise the models of the traditional instruction in the English listening,i.e.,merely focusing on the training of students’English listening skills, while paying no effort to cultivating students’learning interest nor improving their language abilities, It therefore, more or less, hinders the expected progress of the English listening instruction for the rural senior high school students.Experiential Learning is a supposedly effective teaching model with a student-centered learning style, which is well accepted in the moment. It tries to make students "learn from doing" in the language learning contexts, from which students can experience both the happiness in learning English and the success of improving their English communicative capability. Based on the previous research of the approach, it is attempted to conduct an experiment in the application of the experiential learning model to the English listening instruction at the rural senior high schools with a hope to raise the students’ability in the language comprehension and communication.The thesis first expounds the importance of the English listening for the high schoolers and goes on elaborate the necessity and feasibility of the experiential learning on them after pointing out the shortcomings of the currently conducted teaching models at the rural high schools.Then a brief introduction of history of the application of the experiential learning (at home and abroad) is reviewed and its theoretical foundation is given. Upon that three models of English listening comprehension and their limitations are discussed, meanwhile the experiential learning model based on David Kolb’s "Experiential Learning Circle Model is fully illustrated. Finally an experiment of the experiential learning, which is the focus of this thesis, is presented, i.e., a one-year long experiment in two classes (80students in all) of Senior Grade One of No.6Middle School was conducted with the full process of giving questionnaire, testing and data collecting,etc being all provided. The students in Experiment Class (EC) received the teaching model based on experiential learning, while those in Controlled Class (CC) received the traditional teaching model, therefore a visible comparison is sought out. In the end a survey of feedback in the experiential learning is made and an analysis of the results of questionnaires and the experimental data are both presented. So a hypothesis from different aspects is hopefully to be advanced.The thesis concludes that the experiential learning for the rural high school students is effective in evoking the students’interest and gaining proficiency in the language acquisition.