A Study On "Listening Led By Speaking" As Listening Strategy Of English Teaching In Senior Middle School From The Perspective Of Relevance Theory

Listening comprehension is one of the five important skills of learning a language.And it is also an indispensable part of English teaching.However,English listening classes in senior middle school in China are dominated by playing recording and checking answers.Teachers often ignore the guidance of students’ listening strategies,thus making students difficult to improve their listening competence.Therefore,this study was conducted to improve senior middle students’ listening comprehension through "Listening Led by Speaking" training,which is built on the following three bases:(1)The questionnaire survey of listening strategies in the experimental class and the control class shows that senior middle school students have little awareness of listening strategies;(2)Studies on listening strategies by combining listening and speaking have been rarely reported;(3)According to Relevance Theory,the success of verbal communication depends on the listener’s interpretation of the speaker’s utterance."Listening Led by Speaking" making the listener learn some information and do some oral practice about the topic that the speaker may talk about,can help the students find the context related to the unknown information in listening,thus reducing the processing efforts made by the listener in interpreting the speaker’s utterance and helping the listener better understand the discourse.Therefore,based on Relevance Theory,this thesis explores the effectiveness of "Listening Led by Speaking" training in teaching English listening in senior middle school.To be specific,this study was carried out to answer the following 3 questions:(1)Can the"Listening Led by Speaking" training improve students’ listening performance?(2)Does the"Listening Led by Speaking" training contribute to enhancing the listening strategy consciousness of the first grade students in senior middle school?(3)Compared with the traditional listening teaching mode,can the "Listening Led by Speaking" training improve senior middle school students’ listening competence?In this study,two parallel classes of students from an ordinary senior middle school were chosen as the participants,including 49 students in the experimental class and 51 students in the control class.The students in the experimental class and the control class were tested before the experiment.English listening in both the classes was taught by the author."Listening Led by Speaking" training was used in the experimental class,while the traditional teaching mode was used in the control class.After the experiment,the students in the experimental class and the control class were tested and interviewed.Findings show that:(1)Compared with the control class,more students in the experimental class are found with significantly higher scores in the post-test than the pre-test,indicating"Listening Led by Speaking" training can effectively improve students’listening performance.All these indicate that "Listening Led by Speaking" training can effectively improve students’listening comprehension;(2)Interview results show that "Listening Led by Speaking’ training can increase students’ interest in listening learning,ease students’ anxiety and enhance students’confidence in English listening.Therefore,"Listening Led by Speaking" training can enhance students’ awareness of listening strategies;(3)There is significance in listening performance of the post-test between the experimental class and the control class,but significance in improvement of their performance is found only for the experimental class only through Paired Samples Tests.Finally,based on the above results,suggestions are made as follows to improve English listening classes in senior middle school:Teaching English listening should be students-oriented in listening class;interactive activities in class should be as authentic as possible so as to create a good language environment;different cultures should be included in the teaching of English listening so as to enrich students" listening background information.