A Comparative Study On The Effects Of Teaching Listening Comprehension In High School Between Using Authentic Materials And Traditional Textbooks

The teaching of listening comprehension has always been an indispensable part in senior high school.As international communication becomes more and more frequent,trainings on English listening has been paid more attention to.However,there still exist some problems,among which the phenomena of dumb-and-deaf English seems to be the most obvious.The main reasons behind these problems are:(1)listening teaching has long been influenced by the exam-oriented education;(2)what traditional listening textbooks provide is inauthentic listening material that is not consistent with real life communication.As is known to all,the ultimate goal of English teaching is to cultivate students’ communicative competence,so a lot of scholars have been advocating the use of authentic materials to meet the demands of real life communication in the real world.The present researcher advocates giving full play to the use of authentic material in listening teaching with the aid of social media in order to help improve the real listening competence.However,due to the lack of empirical study on this research,there are some controversies on whether authentic material can be applied in the high school classes.Under the guidance of constructivism and authenticity theory,the present researcher tries to test,via empirical study,the difference in the learning outcome arising from two different kinds of listening materials: authentic material and traditional textbook.The subjects are 90 students from two Grade 11 classes taught by the present researcher in a key high school.The two classes’ overall listening competence is at the same level before the experiment.During the experiment,the authentic listening material is used in the experimental class while the controlled class still uses the traditional textbooks.Both of the two classes use the same teaching method.After the experiment,the present researcher collects and compares the test scores of the experimental class with that of the controlled class in order to explore which material can better improve students’ listening competence and the impacts of each material on students of different levels.Besides,the same questionnaire is conducted before and after the experiment to examine the students’ attitude towards the effects of using different teaching materials in listening class.The major findings are presented as follows: according to the post-test,significant difference in the listening performance exists between students in experimental class and controlled class,showing that authentic listening materials can better help improve students’ real listening competence compared to traditional textbooks.What’s more,authentic materials work better for high score group and average score group.For low score group,the two learning materials do not produce big difference.According to the survey,authentic listening materials have better effects on students than traditional textbooks.Authentic listening materials can better help students adapt to different English accents,faster speed,linking of sounds,and idiomatic expressions.Besides,they are more effective in helping students to master the latest language change and social development.Authentic listening materials also serve as a tool to help students know more about western culture and prepare them for real-life communication.The implications we may derive from the research include 1)English teachers should replace traditional textbooks with authentic materials in order to help improve students’ real listening competence.2)Teachers should select appropriate materials and make listening tasks suitable to students of different levels.And 3)For low score group who made little progress during the experiment,the teacher should increase the amount of language input and give them more instructions on listening strategy.