Investigation Into Students Learning Difficulties Of English Listening In Rural Junior High School:a Case Study

For a long period of time, English education in elementary and secondary schools has mainly focused on the training of reading and writing skills and neglected the cultivation of listening and speaking abilities. This has directly led to a gradually deeper contradiction between English teaching and language use. With the development of English education and research on English teaching and learning, people become increasingly aware of the importance of listening and speaking skills. As the basis of language input, the major way of information acquisition, and the foundation for the development of other language skills, listening plays a crucial and irreplaceable role in both daily communication and English learning. Despite its obvious importance, listening has long been regarded as a passive skill and thus been neglected for a long time in the research of English as a foreign language (EFL). In recent years, however, with the perception of its significance, there has been an increased focus on listening.However, due to various reasons, Chinese students, especially those in rural areas, have encountered many difficulties and problems in listening. Existing studies of listening difficulties mainly focus on elementary and senior high schools. Research on junior high schools, especially those rural ones, is relatively few. Therefore, the author selects a rural junior high school in Anhui province to do investigation, and chooses194students and2English teachers from three classes of grade eight as the participants.This investigation is carried out under the guidance of the general objective stipulated by the2011English Curriculum Standards for Nine-year Compulsory Education (English Curriculum Standards) to explore listening difficulties of students in rural junior high schools. It centers on the logical order of "problem-reason-countermeasure", and adopts questionnaire, interview and classroom observation as the main instruments to collect data, including two questionnaires concerning listening difficulties, a group interview of eight students, and two separate teacher interviews. The major aim is to explore the difficulties and problems confronted by junior high school students in rural areas, analyze the underlying reasons and influencing factors, and put forward some corresponding countermeasures to help teachers understand the difficulties the learners encounter, and thus enable the students to improve their comprehension level and listening learning efficiency. Investigation data shows that the difficulties and problems lie in both linguistic and non-linguistic aspects, In addition, there are also some difficulties specific to rural schools. Linguistic difficulties basically include problems in speech, vocabulary and grammar. Non-linguistic difficulties consist of troubles in listening strategy, background knowledge, psychology and emotion, mother tongue, listening material, faculty of memory and so on. Specific difficulties mainly compose problems in teacher faculty, social environment, school environment and family environment.There are many reasons for those problems. This thesis divides the general and common ones into aspects of learner, teacher, material and environment based on learner factor and non-learner factor. Reasons caused by learners analyze the causes from language foundation, psychological and affective state, listening habit, background knowledge and listening strategy. Reasons caused by teachers explore the causes from theoretical basis, professional level, teaching method and teaching ideology. Reasons caused by materials investigate the causes from its origin, selection and features. Reasons caused by environmental factors discuss the causes from aspects of society, school and family.Based on the existing problems encountered by the participants and the underlying reasons, with due consideration of the fact that strategies vary with different listening stages and tasks, some suggestions and listening strategies are proposed correspondingly in accordance with pre-class, in-class and after-class periods. Of the three phases, the second consists of pre-listening stage, while-listening stage and post-listening stage.Though there are some particularities in listening difficulties for every school and every individual learner, they share even more generalities and similarities. Therefore, this paper’s investigation into listening difficulties and problems that the target school students meet in their daily listening learning and some corresponding countermeasures, on the one hand, facilitates the teachers’ understanding of the learners so that they can help them understand the nature of listening and improve their listening ability and learning efficiency; on the other hand, acts as a reference for schools with similar problems and relative research on listening.