A Study On The Application Of Situational Approach In English Listening Teaching At Junior Middle Schools

English listening is very important in the communication.But at present,in China most teachers still adopt the traditional teaching model in English listening teaching at junior middle schools.This traditional teaching model is conducted without language environment.In such learning environment,the classroom teaching atmosphere is depressing.In class,the students just passively listen to the tape that the teacher plays for them and finally what they acquire are just isolated knowledge and de-contextualized skills.This directly leads to a result that the development of the students' listening and speaking abilities is hampered.By means of objects,pictures and realias,the situational approach can help teachers to create situations to put students in audio-visual conditions,provide them with sensory stimulation of images and voice,and let students acquire knowledge in full language environment.It has been proved that the situational approach has an important influence on English teaching.However,most of the studies in this field are concerned about university students and mainly focus on the comprehensive language skills.These studies lack the detailed research on junior middle school students and specific language skill,especially on English listening skill.This study attempts to explore the effects of the application of situational approach on English listening teaching at junior middle schools.Three research questions are involved in this study.Firstly,can the situational approach help to improve the junior middle school students' learning interest in English listening? Secondly,can the situational approach help to promote the junior middle school students' English listening proficiency? Thirdly,does the situational approach have the same positive effect on both successful learners and unsuccessful learners in the experimental class? The study takes two classes of Grade Eight at Xin An School in An Qiu as subjects,in which one class is chosen as the experimental class and the other one as the control class.The experimental class is taught with the situational approach while the control class is taught with the traditional teaching model.In the process of the experiment,all the data are collected by means of English listening tests,questionnaires and the interview.By analyzing all the data in this experiment,the author draws the following conclusion.Firstly,the situational approach helps to improve the junior middle school students' learning interest in English listening.Secondly,the situational approach helps to improve the junior middle school students' English listening proficiency.Thirdly,the situational approach has the same positive effect on both successful learners and unsuccessful learners in the experimental class.In addition,the author puts forward some teaching suggestions on the application of situational approach in English listening teaching at junior middle schools.Although there are some limitations in this study,the author hopes that this study could be helpful to the future research on the application of situational approach in English listening teaching.