A Study On The Influence Of Prosody Skills On Students’ English Listening Comprehension Abilities In High Schools

Under the background of globalization,the importance of English as an important communication tool has become increasingly prominent,among which English listening,a core skill of language communication,has attracted extensive attention from the English teaching field in China.A few domestic studies have shown that prosody can help listeners better understand the information that the speaker wants to express.Therefore,combining prosody with listening can not only cultivate students’ prosody awareness,but also improve their listening comprehension abilities.However,the current high school English listening teaching pays very little attention to prosody,which leads to problems such as lack of students’ sense of prosody and prosody skills.This study attempts to apply prosody knowledge to listening teaching so as to explore the influence of prosody skills on high school students’ English listening comprehension abilities through empirical research.In this study,90 students from two parallel classes of Grade One were selected as the research subjects.Class One is the experimental class(EC)and Class Two is the control class(CC).The traditional listening teaching method was implemented in the control class,while in the experimental class,the teacher visualized the listening materials by showing the spectrograms and the prosodic marks of the listening materials.Additionally,specific intensive teaching methods such as non-verbal language exercises were added into imitation activities to make students independently realize the importance of prosody in listening comprehension,and gradually develop their prosody skills and finally achieve the goals on the improvement of listening comprehension level.At the same time,the following research questions were answered:(1)What are the prosody features in the information of solving problems in listening tasks of College Entrance Examination?(2)What are the effective methods to develop students’ prosody skills while teaching listening?(3)What are the influences of prosody skills on students’ listening learning?The results of this study were as follows:(1)In College Entrance Examination English listening,the answer to the question usually appears in the stress and rising tone so as to arouse the attention of the students.(2)In listening teaching,some students claimed the effective strategy was to firstly see the spectrograms and then imitate the listening materials with marks,while others claimed that the above strategies was not enough,and non-verbal language was more important,which can make them have a deep impression.(3)When students know what key information should be paid attention in listening test,they do not need to distribute their attention equally during listening,but focus more on the important information prompted by the prosody characteristics,which effectively reduces their listening anxiety.More importantly,the visualization of prosody can increase students’ listening interests and confidence and develop their prosody skills,thus they improve their listening abilities which in turn increase their confidence.In general,prosody skills play a very important role in improving high school students’ listening comprehension abilities,and it is also very effective to apply prosody knowledge to the listening comprehension.