An Empirical Study Of Comprehensive English Listening Training In Junior Middle Schools

Both in human communication activities, and in the process of language learning,listening occupies a very important position and plays an important role. It is thefoundation of speaking, reading and writing. The teaching of English listening remainsdifficult in junior middle schools. It should draw the attention of English teachers. But upto now English listening training in junior middle schools has mostly adopted workbooks.Students have listening exercises instead of listening training. Although the types ofexercises are similar to those of the questions in listening tests, the training method is toosimple. Especially before the high school entrance examination, in order to get satisfactoryresults in the listening section, teachers usually make students do a large number oflistening exercises in workbooks. But without considering the long-term accumulation oflistening skills and the cultivation of good listening habits, this kind of teaching methodleads to inefficiency in English listening instruction. Therefore, the purpose of this study isto analyze the problems in the traditional approach to teaching English listening and to usea comprehensive model to improve students’level of English listening.The research began with a questionnaire, which aimed at gaining information of thepresent situation of English listening training in junior middle schools and the difficultiesthat students encountered in English training.110students from two parallel classes inGrade Seven, who are taught by the researcher, participated in the survey. Then anexperiment was designed to check whether the experimental group (with comprehensivelistening practice) could achieve better results than the control group (with traditionallistening practice) or to what extent the experimental group could enhance their listening.The following questions are addressed in this study:(1) What are the problems of thetraditional listening teaching?(2) How does the comprehensive listening training work outin improving the teaching of English listening?The research findings are summarized as follows: Firstly, junior middle schoolstudents can realize the importance of English listening, but they are not very interested init. They have listening training for the purpose of taking examinations. Students’ listeningpractice is mainly organized by their teachers in class. They seldom practice listening after class by themselves. So the listening exercises mainly come from supporting materials ofthe textbooks and the content that teachers add. The factors that make listening quitedifficult include many new words, fast speed, long sentences, and incomprehension of theforeign social backgrounds and English idioms. These factors also cause students to makemistakes. Junior middle school students think that improving English listening skillsdepends most on the teacher’s teaching method, the student’s persistence and practice, andthe correct English pronunciation and good spoken English.Secondly, the traditional listening teaching method cannot improve the controlgroup’s listening effectively. Being time-consuming and inefficient is the main problem ofthe traditional listening teaching. The traditional listening training ignores different kindsof difficulties in listening, the cultivation of listening habits, the long-term accumulation oflistening skills, and also disregards the importance of listening, which is a basic skill, in theEnglish curriculum. This kind of training is tedious and boring. As a result, it can’t helpstudents to have a strong interest in listening. Instead, it weakens students’ enthusiasm inlistening training.Thirdly, the comprehensive English listening training in junior middle schools doesplay a vital role in improving the teaching of English listening. After one semester ofcomprehensive listening training, students in the experimental group have improved theirlistening a lot and made progress in learning English.To some extent, the research sheds light on the teaching of English listening in juniormiddle schools. Teachers should realize that the traditional model of English listeningtraining is inefficient and they should know that language input plays a leading role inlanguage learning. Teachers should make sure that the teaching of listening is integratedinto other teaching activities, such as speaking, reading and writing. Teachers have to givestudents a variety of comprehensive and interactive training in class. Teachers ought tofollow the i+1model in Krashen’s Input Hypothesis. They should set the level of thelistening training material slightly higher than the students’ English level so as to make thetraining materials comprehensible.