An Experimental Study On The Effects Of Shadowing Exercise On The English Listening Span And Listening Proficiency Of Junior High School Students

The English listening test scores of junior high school students are generally low.Many students show that they can’t understand the meaning of what they have heard,while the information they understand is quickly forgotten,which make them obtain incomplete listening information and thus affect the performance in the listening test.Because students are not familiar with the phonetic intonation of listening materials,they cannot quickly connect the phonetic signal with its semantic meaning.Besides,the fast speech rate makes unprocessed information easily be forgotten.The reason why students can’t distinguish the pronunciation,can’t keep up with the listening speed,and can’t process the information in time is that the working memory capacity is insufficient,that is,the listening span is not high.In view of the above problems,the researcher,based on the Working Memory Theory,the Cognitive Load Theory and the Second Language Acquisition Theory,tried to explore whether shadowing exercise can affect the English listening span and listening proficiency of junior high school students.With the help of quantitative and qualitative research methods,this thesis aims to explore the following three research questions: Can the shadowing exercise improve the listening span of junior high school students? Can the shadowing exercise improve the English listening proficiency of junior high school students? How is the listening span correlated with English listening proficiency?A total of 80 junior high school students from two classes of Grade Eight participated in this experiment for 10 weeks.The number of students in both Experimental Class and Control Classes was 40.Before the experiment,the pre-tests of listening span and listening proficiency were hold in both Experimental Class and Control Class,with the aim of testifying whether the listening span and listening proficiency of the two classes were similar.During the teaching experiment,the researcher applied gist-retelling method to the Control Class for listening teaching,while in the Experimental Class,the researcher adopted shadowing exercise for listening teaching.After the experiment,a listening span post-test and a listening proficiency post-test were carried out to testify whether there was an obvious difference between pre-test and post-test of listening span and listening proficiency.Furthermore,the effectiveness of shadowing exercise was also testified.After collecting the data,the researcher analyzed the results from both listening span tests and listening proficiency tests by the SPSS 24.0.Besides,in order to get a comprehensive understanding of the effects of the shadowing exercise and the difficulties students encountered in the shadowing exercise,six students in the Experimental Class were selected to take part in the interviews.The major findings of this study can be summarized as the following three aspects: Shadowing exercise can improve junior high school students’ listening span;Shadowing exercise can improve junior high school students’ listening proficiency;There is a distinct positive correlation between English listening span and English listening proficiency.Hence,compared with the gist-retelling method,the shadowing exercise based on the above three theories can effectively improve students’ English listening span and listening proficiency,and achieve a better English listening teaching effect.