[Theories,and,Strategies,of,Listening,Teaching] on and on什么意思

　　Introduction　　Listening is the basic ability of communication activities. The objective of College English Teaching is to promote the students’ integrative ability that equips them with the basic ability in communication, thus using simple everyday English in life. In addition, skills in writing and translation are also demanded of the courses. Throughout the three-year instruction, listening is always the weak part. Although the students can grasp some basic grammar rules and a limited vocabulary, their listening comprehension is still poor. How to improve the students’ listening has long been the concerned point of teachers. This essay will discuss the process of listening and focus on the main methods that can help students to improve their listening.
　　1．The nature and process of listening comprehension
　　Language is the tool of communication, “Of all the communicative activities, to understand the speaker is the most basic one.” In Kenneth’s opinion, listening comprehension is made up of 5 parts: discrimination; perception of message; auditory memory; decoding message; use or store message. The latter always depends on the former in order. When it comes to discrimination, it refers to the first step in the process of listening comprehension, that is, discriminating all kinds of sounds of speech, intonations and tones etc. In the second step students will deliberately perceive the different combinations of sounds of speech in order to get the meaning of each sentence. Auditory memory is to keep a short-time memory of the obtained messages before their being understood, which will be finished in the next step. After these four steps follows the result of the output of the messages, thus ensuring the communication. Anderson has a much simpler understanding of listening comprehension. As for him, 3 related and circulatory parts form this process: perceptual processing; parsing; utilization. First, the listener will focus on the listening material and carry on the short-time memory. Next, the listener will transform the sounds into clauses, phrases, words and other lingual units, forming meaningful messages in the form of mental representation. A good comprehension forms when the mental representation and acquired knowledge are united via the lingual knowledge. From above, we can know that listening comprehension is a very complicated cognitive process.
　　2. The Strategies of Teaching Listening
　　2.1 Bottom-up and top-down strategies 　　We teachers should choose the ‘bottom-up’ strategy for junior students limited by English knowledge and background information. The ‘Bottom-up’ strategy helps students to analyse the obtained information. It will influence students’ listening comprehension if they can not easily distinguish the single unit. The pronunciations of the words in a sentence are often affected by the words next to each other, thus forming such phenomena as assimilation, liaison, incomplete explosion, elision and so forth. So the most important step for a beginner is to correct pronunciation and to strengthen phonetic knowledge.
　　The ‘top-down’ model suggests that learners actively reconstruct the original meaning of the speaker using input words as clues. The listener uses acquired knowledge about the topic and the speaker himself. Various activities like spot dictation, role playing are strongly recommended in this process. Meanwhile, teachers should help students to make dialogues from their own experiences according to the given information. It is a good way to enhance students’ listening comprehension.
　　2.2 Choose the suitable listening materials
　　?? Before class, teachers must choose and analyse the materials. “Teacher needs to listen to the tape all the way through .That way, they will be prepared for any problems, noises, accents etc. That way they can judge whether students will be able to cope with the tape and the tasks that go with it.” [4]?In this way, the teacher will know the length, the difficult points and the focus of the materials, so the teacher can decide beforehand how to continue the teaching in class. Of course, it is a demand for teachers of all other courses. However, some teachers believe that they can teach listening without any preparation as long as they have the tapes and reference books. So some researchers would like to place importance on the preparations for a class: it is the basic need as well as a basic insurance of an effective listening teaching. And the role of an analyst means that teachers should analyse the functional patterns of the language used in the listening materials that students are to hear. The functions of a language can be simply divided into two patterns: the communication of emotion and the conveying of information. Communication of emotion means that the purpose of using a language is mainly for the establishment of harmonious relationship among the participants of social interaction.
　　Besides the adoption of the materials available, teachers should supplement many other kinds of materials in order to help students to feel the vivid English language from all sides. 　　For example, teachers can stimulate students to use their eyes, ears by listening to the English songs, watching English soundtrack of the film. More interesting materials can develop students’interest, making them positive learners. If students are passive in class, they are easy to get nervous, tired, and sleepy. So the materials should be carefully selected accordingly.
　　2.3 Prediction and Post-listening activity
　　Research on speech processing and interpretation suggests that the listener’s ability to make intelligent guesses about what will come next plays a crucial role in their understanding of speech, and prediction is regarded by many researchers as one of the most powerful factors in comprehension. Therefore, a good listener is a good predictor. “By helping our students become better predictors, we are helping them become better listeners.”[6]
　　Prediction also involves asking questions and answering them. According to Fisher and Terry active comprehension is process of generating questions while reading and searching for answers to them. Questioning helps to establish the purpose and causes the listener to interact with the speech, confirming or rejecting expectations. “Penny Ur summarizes five types of cues that listeners depend on for making predictions about continuation of an utterance:
　　(1) The stock formula of the language, such as clichés, idioms, quotations and proverbs.
　　(2) Stress on a particular word in the first part of an utterance is often explained or clarified by a comment in the second.
　　(3) The logical relationship between the first part of an utterance and the second is often signalled by a conjunction.
　　(4) There is construction where the speaker proclaims in advance the kind of thing he is going to say.
　　(5) Rhetorical questions or bold, brief statements, particularly in the negative, are often followed by answers or amplification in the form of reasons, examples or explanations.” [7]
　　Post--- listening, teachers can evaluate how well the students have understood the listening materials, but to design the tasks well should go first. “One important point to keep in mind is whether we are testing the students’ listening comprehension or their memory. In fact, in real life, listener can remember the gist of the conversation, but cannot remember exactly what words were said. It is more natural to select and interpret what we hear rather than repeat everything we have heard.” [8] .Here are some types of post—listening activity: multiple choice questions; answering questions; note-taking; gap-filling. “It is important to remember when designing activities not to demand that students remember more details than the native-speaker would in a real life, because we do not want our students to get into the habit of thinking that they need to understand and remember.” [6] 　　2.4 Increase reading exercises and background knowledge
　　Based on the reading materials, teachers should place more emphasis on the introduction of cultural background. Teachers should introduce background information in class, using resources from the internet to make students understand easily and vividly. When students have enough background information, they can easily and correctly understand the listening materials.
　　2.5 Intensive and extensive listening
　　Students can improve their listening skills and gain valuable language input through a combination of intensive and extensive listening.
　　Intensive listening not only makes students understand the whole passage, but also clear about each word and sentence in the passage. As is often the case, the students will listen to the materials several times, divide the passage into several parts and then analyze them one by one.
　　Extensive listening just requires the students to grasp the general idea of the passage. Intensive listening enhances students’ basic listening skills. Extensive listening consolidates and enlarges the effect of intensive listening.
　　Materials with low speed and clear pronunciation should be included in intensive- listening teaching, such as VOA (Voice Of America) Special English. Teacher helps students to listen to every word and sentence, especially the number which our Chinese students are not sensitive to. After students are familiar with the low- speed audio materials, teacher changes them for the normal- speed ones like news. As for the ability to grasp the general idea of the news, extensive- listening method should be used.
　　3. Conclusion
　　Faced with the challenges of the 21st century and the need of modern society, English teaching becomes more and more important. Of the different aspects about English, listening teaching should be emphasized. As teachers design different tasks, they gain new insights about the learning potential of their students. “These successes have encouraged teachers to persevere in their efforts to design learning experiences that provide multiple entry and exit points for their students.”[7] During the English teaching, it is important for teachers to master the teaching theory and the strategy of designing the listening activities.
　　
　　References
　　[1] Peizhong Pan, VOA News Listening Training, Shanghai: Shanghai Foreign Language Education Press. 2002.
　　[2] Qixin He, English Junior and Advanced Listening, Beijing: Foreign Language Teaching and Research Publisher. 1992.
　　[3] Jeremy Harmer. The Practice of English Language Teaching England: Oxford Illustrators Ltd. 2001.
　　[4]Jeremy Harmer. How to teach English [M].Beijing: Foreign Language and Research Press，2000.8.?
　　[5] Penney Ur. A Course in Language Teaching, London: Cambridge University Press. 1991
　　[6] Wang Qiang. A course in English language teaching [Z].Shanghai: Higher Education Press, 2002
　　[7]Dai Weidong. A New Concise Course on Linguistics for Students of English [Z].Shanghai: Shanghai Foreign Language Education Press.
　　[8] Zhun Cun. Psychology of Language Teaching [Z].Shanghai: Shanghai Foreign Language Education Press，1998

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