An Experimental Study On The Effectiveness Of Chunk-based Dictation Practice In Improving Junior High School Students' Listening Comprehension

As an important skill in language learning,listening has been attracting more and more attention of linguists and scholars in education both at home and abroad.In the English Teaching of our country,listening has been the most important and difficult point to break through.Low listening ability is the main obstacle for learners to achieve normal communication.According to the related research,vocabulary is the main and basic factor that affects students' listening comprehension.However,in the junior middle school English Teaching in China,although the students have mastered the basic vocabulary and grammar,it is difficult to effectively improve their listening comprehension.Many teachers only pay attention to the teaching and dictation of basic words,while ignoring the relevant phrases,word groups,habitual collocations,commonly used sentence patterns,etc..Mastering the language units,which are called "language chunks",is more conducive to students' understanding of the listening text.Therefore,the purpose of this experimental study is to integrate the lexical chunks into the students' dictation practice,and try to answer the following questions:(1)How is junior high school English teachers' dictation to students?(2)How is the students' learning situation in English listening comprehension and the awareness of the language chunks?(3)Can the chunk-based dictation practice efficiently improve junior high school students' listening comprehension?Based on the theory of lexical chunk,short-term memory and bottom-up listening teaching,this research takes students in two parallel class at the 2018 grade of Miansha Junior Middle School in Chengkou County,Chongqing.Before the beginning of the experiment,based on the interviews with English teachers and the students' questionnaires,I learned about the present situation of the students' dictation practice and the students' learning in listening comprehension.On this basis,two classes were selected randomly as the experimental class and the control class to conduct a pre-test of listening level,and the experimental class was given a 16-week “chunk-based” dictation practice,while the control class shall carry out the conventional dictation.Then after post-test the students' listening in two classes,by comparing the results of pre-and post-test on students' listening comprehension and the two questionnaires before and after the experiment,this paper analysed whether the chunk-based dictation can effectively improve junior high school students' listening comprehension or not.The main findings of this research are as follows: firstly,the chunk-based dictation practice can effectively improve students' listening comprehension.Secondly,the dictation practice of lexical chunks increases students' confidence in learning English listening comprehension.Thirdly,the chunk-based dictation practice makes students pay more attention to the role of lexical chunks in English listening comprehension.Therefore,teachers who are in the junior high school should pay more attention to the role of lexical chunks in English listening comprehension.We teachers should be good at using the lexical chunks to the daily English teaching,especially in the traditional dictation practice,so as to effectively improve the students' listening comprehension and increase students' confidence in listening learning.