怎样提高初中生的英语听力能力

How to Improve Listening Ability of English for

Junior Middle School Students

Abstract:During my three-month internships in national training program, I have

been totally felt the fear of junior middle school students for English listening. It’s self-evident that English listening is one of the most important parts of English teaching for junior middle school students. At present, there is a certain distance between listening ability acquired by junior middle students and curriculum objectives. Many students can do a very good job in written exams but feel completely confused in listening tests. Why is listening so difficult for junior middle school students to understand? What are the reasons? How to solve the problem?

Key words: national training program junior middle school students

English listening English teaching

怎样提高初中生的英语听力能力

摘要：我在三个月的国培计划顶岗实习中，已经充分的感受到了初中生对于英语听力的恐惧

度。不言而喻，初中生的英语听力是初中英语教学中一个重要的环节。目前大部分初中生的

英语听力教学与教学大纲所规定的目标却有着一定的距离。很多学生在笔试的时候能够做到

得心应手，而在听力考试的时候却不知所云。为什么听力理解对于初中生来说如此困难?原

因何在？如何解决?

关键词：国培计划初中生英语听力听力教学

1. Introduction

The purpose of English teaching focus on cultivating students to use language for communication, which contains four skills of capability, including listening, speaking, reading and writing. Listening teaching is an important and difficult task for junior middle school students. English teachers often regard it as a common problem

listening ability. In real life, interpersonal communication

of improving the students’

mainly concerns about listening and speaking communication, while the traditional

mode of education students trained in listening and speaking fell far behind in reading

and writing skills. It’s an indisputable fact that many students become a "deaf" or a "dumb" after learning a foreign language for many years. And I heard the

improvement of communication skills has much to do with the improvement of

listening skill. However, many junior middle school students have significant

problems during the hearing process. Therefore, to improve listening ability has not

only become the dream of most junior middle school students, but also the wish of

many junior middle school English teachers. This article aims at how to improve

English listening skills for junior middle school students

from the following aspects: raise the question, analyze the problem and solve the

problem.

2. Raising the question

Listening is the premise of receiving language information. Only after understanding the listening can we properly accept and use the information. According to a proven statistics, we spend 45 percent of our time in listening, 30

percent in speaking, 16 percent and 9 percent in reading and writing respectively,

from which we can see the necessity of listening improvement. In modern society, listening and speaking are often regarded as communication skills that determine the success o r failure of a person, which is the needs of social development, with the development of English exam reformation, the importance of listening as a major component of the English test has been widely recognized and valued among the community, teachers and students. Therefore, it’s imminent to improve the listening ability of middle school students so as to stand on an invincible position during the examination. Junior middle students in hearing directly affect the quality of their

schools into high-level English education and the comprehensive ability, which may

affect their future development. However, as the things stand today, the majority of

students in junior middle school students, particularly in rural areas feel bad in the

hearing and lose lots of points in the listening examination, which directly affects

their performance in English and even their interest in learning English. It’s Undeniable that English teachers in many of the junior middle school haven’t implemented good teaching of the listening because of some constraints, which result

in slow improvement in listening of the students. So to solve this problem has already become the most important of English language teaching.

3，Analyzing the reasons

3.1. Barriers of their English ability and sound change phenomena

students find it difficult to understand when new words, new sentences and new grammatical phenomena appeared in the listening material, other factors such as the

Italian group, continuous sound of assimilation, sentence stress and intonation,

changes in the speed of speech rate, reading skills and many other reasons are likely

to increase The difficulty of listening comprehension, which may also affect the

students’　

understanding.

3.2. Barriers of cultural difference and different living habits

Due to the different British American lifestyle and cultural background, students still

find it difficult to understand fully even if the material has no new words. If you let

students listen to a story about China's traditional festival such as Mid-Autumn

Festival articles and article on the content of foreign Christmas, the two almost equal

easy, but for a Chinese student listening to the content of former article is much better

than the latter one. Now, let me just give you one small example: Lily went to Beijing

on Christmas Eve and she stayed there for 3days．Question：On what day did Lily get

back? A．On Oct 23；B．On Oct 24；C．On Oct 26；D．On Oct 27．The right

answer is D. But some students chose A, since he has heard the word “three”, oth simply replied:I was luck, because I do not know what time Christmas Eve is.

3.3. Psychological barriers.

Listening comprehension is a more complex psychological process. Students always

feel the low level of their hearing and are easy to produce the fear of listening in a

passive state, which result in too much tension and less concentration on listening;

this will in turn lead to much loss of points. Some students are always want to listen to

every word clearly during listening comprehension, which also plays a negative effect

on understanding of the whole article. In addition, the external environment such as

indoor and outdoor noise, radio cassette player quality, the size of the sound may also

affect the students listening comprehension during the listening process.

3.4. Lack of language environment

On the one hand, English teachers speak Chinese most times during class rather

English since many students can not understand and they ask their teachers to speak

more Chinese. On the other hand, students almost use standard Chinese for

communication in everyday life and seldom practice English with their classmates

and teachers. Therefore, students have little opportunity for exposure to English, and

the occasional English class will be the only language environment for the students. In

such a language environment, much time and effort should be taken to improve their

English listening skills.

3.5 Limited teaching conditions

-media teaching instruments,

Currently, many classrooms in rural schools haven’t multi

so students are exposed to English listen only when the teacher sometimes speak

English at class and during the listening test. Many students can not afford to buy

some listening devices such as MP3, MP4, etc., in addition to classes the normal

hearing test is almost beyond the reach of English outside of the class, not to say how

to improve listening ability, so these largely affect the students’ Improvement a development of hearing ability.

3.6 Lack of examination skills

First of all, students do not know how to make the best of the limited time before

listening test and analyze the implicit information given by the listening test, so they

have no clear direction and selectivity during the listening process; Secondly, the

students will think more about a few words during the process of listening tests

because of not understanding clearly, which may affect the whole understanding of

the test；Last but not the least, some students want to understand all of the details and

meaning of the test, which seems unnecessary and may indirectly affect the accuracy

of the answer, s ince one’s mind is always thinking of it. Once something is not

.

understand able, it’s easy to be irritable

4 Solving the problem

4.1From the prospective of the teachers

4.1.1 Teachers play a leading role, use more English and oral expression to create

English language environment for the students

New curriculum is characterized by colloquial English, communication, practical, and its

content is very close to life. In most secondary schools, especially in rural schools, lack of

English language learning environment, students only have access to English schools,

and only might have felt the atmosphere of English in the English classroom. Therefore ,

English teachers should organize more accurate and easy understanding English

combining with gestures, facial expressions and etc during the English and write more on

the blackboard to help students understand the meaning of spoken English, which is to

activate the classroom atmosphere and inspire the enthusiasm, self-awareness and

interest of the students in learning English. Secondly, teachers can request one or two

students per day for 5 minutes Free talk, other students will require careful listening,

after hearing a number of questions and answers, then to examine the effect of

exercise.

4.1.2 Teachers should emphasize on the pronunciation foundation

As the old saying goes, "to teach him to fish rather than to give him the fish.” So it’s

better to teach students the voice of knowledge, universal knowledge of their

pronunciation and intonation in the beginning after students entering junior middle

school, so that they learn to recognize English pronunciation. Teachers should also

encourage students to listen to the pure voice of English repeatedly and imitate them.

Slowly they will develop a habit of authentic spoken English, because the pure

authentic standard spoken English capabilities can not only improve their English

communication skills, will also promote the development of their English listening.

Third, teachers must guide students to memorize words in good ways. It’s a

prerequisite to learn words and the accumulation of learning any language, English is

no exception. Learn to spend less time and energy to remember more words deeply is

also good for one’s listening, since the word’s pronunciation has much to do with the listening. In conclusion, good memory of the words and proper pronunciation will

surely do help for one’s listening.

4.1.3Put listening teaching as an important status in the English class

When students first walked into English class, teachers should begin listening

teaching and adhere to take the tape recorder into the classroom every day. New English textbooks have arranged listening training and language training, so teachers should make full use of these materials to train the students step by step through a variety of listening practice, which can help the students to have a comprehensive understanding and capture important information through the Analysis of Meaning

and semantic capabilities. Predictive power is the core of the semantic competence, to imagine, guess, infer the meaning of the text and its inherent basic that’s to say,

skills through the context. For instance, the article genre can be guessed through the subject of the article; the scope of the background and description can be known after hearing a few words at the beginning of the article; from the narration of the first paragraph, the development of the general context can be inferred. So in the hearing process, teachers should focus on training students with language based on the knowledge, cultural background knowledge and language knowledge, to fully imagine, speculate, speculate, predict, and summarize the content.

Besides the above discussion, teachers should also make best use of every class, every teaching link to cultivate and train students’listening and speaking skills. Ask students to close the books and just listen to the tape carefully to familiar with its pronunciation, intonation, and to guess the main ideas and answer a few questions. Then get students to open the books to check the correct answers, to read the dialogue or text following by teachers, it will also be a great help for the students to improve

their English listening comprehension.

4.1.4 Pay much attention to repeated teaching and encourage s tudents t o read more and recite more of the listening text

First of all, ask students to repeat what they have heard sentence by sentence, or to write down them if necessary during the listening training, of course, teachers should give a pause after a certain time. After finishing that, teachers give the standard answers. So that students do fully understand the contexts. This is also a good way to improve the students’ listening ability, and the fact of it is a really four carved stone

and speaking through the since it has trained students’ listening, memory, writing

process of listening and repeating, why not do it? In the second place, encourage students to foster the habits of reading and reciting listening draft, let them do it in the morning or in their spare time. The aim of it is to enable them to have a better understanding of many various topics and more importantly to cultivate their

sense of English, which is a good preparation for their future listening tests and listening comprehension.

4.1.5 Encourage students to absorb knowledge of English through various channels, to improve their English listening comprehension

As we all know, English is the world's most widely used language, and in our lives, in addition to Chinese language, the greatest exposure is the most frequent English, and

society needs more and more English talents, so we must encourage students to see a brief plain English article, read more newspapers and magazines in English, to learn more about the cultural background and customs of English-speaking countries , etc.; use MP3 to listen to English radio stations and some English programs such as Li

Yang Crazy English, as these fluent and pure English suitable for students of English listening training. Students should regularly tuning in, and seriously imitate their tone

of voice. In addition, teachers need to encourage students to speak English with each

.

other anywhere outside of the class to form the deep atmosphere of English

4.1.6 Self-improvement of teachers’listening ability is the premise of improvement of the students’

To teachers, listening demanding higher quality, teachers must not only have

profound knowledge of grammar, but also have excellent communication skills of listening and speaking. It’s hard to require students to improve their listening if teachers have no solid basic skills. Therefore, Teachers should strive to overcome the interference of mother tongue, to enhance their listening training, regularly attend professional training courses in English listening, specifically to carry out research activities and explore feasible means of teaching English listening and teaching skills, and continuously improve the quality of their listening, speaking, and teaching level.

Listening should follow a gradual, progressive approach to the principle and

follow the scientific training methods. The material chosen to reflect the progressive

. approach and progressive law should be trained by articles followed by sentences

4.2From the prospective of the students

4.2.1Focus on the development of good psychology

nt to keep good condition and consciously form good habits for the

It’s quite significa

cultivation of listening. The level of psychological state will directly affect the result

of listening comprehension test. Appropriate motivation and anxiety do help students

to achieve good results, but too strong motivation and excessive anxiety will make students feel nervous. Therefore, students should not artificially create tension but try

to alleviate their psychological pressure formed because of fear, pressure and resentment. So they will increase their confidence and feel relaxed to do well in the relaxing atmosphere. Only when one feel relaxed during the listening test can one feel relaxed and free to speak English and listen it in a calm, ease and natural atmosphere

in the normal communication.

4.2.2To familiar with the types listening comprehension

Generally speaking, Listening Comprehension includes four types: 1, the word sound; 2, a single sentence comprehension: 3, dialogue understanding; 4 fill in the blank and understand the short essay. The contents of it have data and facts. Data may be the date, time, price, number of items, transport start time and arrival time, and sometimes the need for simple computation. The fact is that there are people, occupation, location, purpose, method, reason, and other topics.

In response to these kinds of questions, students need to do more and more practice.

Arrange some time a week for listening tests and adopting a gradual approach. The problems should be dressed in the listening test process after each test time. Look often as soon as possible before the selection in order to find common ground and differences, according to their own background knowledge of the association, assuming, it may have to ask the question. The details of the process should be shorthand, the sooner the better. Short training, should be placed on key words, such as: who, what, when, why, where, how, etc., but also to grasp some of the commonly

ng didn’t hear bused short form, genre, and commonly used words. In case somethi

clearly, students must promptly give up, which may affect the subsequent tests.

4.2.3 Ask for more help to the teacher and do more experience exchange with classmates

After all, students are not as experienced as teachers, and they may often feel confused during the studying process and need much help for recovery, so turning to the teachers is a great choice, maybe they will be inspired and enlighten through the communication with the teachers. Besides, is to communicate frequently with classmates for exchanging experience, practice listening to their share of income and, in turn, others will also share their income with you, and then conduct a comprehensive analysis complement with each other.

5. Conclusion

In conclusion, the cultivation and improvement of listening ability is a complex process that requires teachers and students master the scientific training methods and study skills through the joint efforts, and through persistent efforts to achieve satisfactory results. Listening training process is the process of practicing martial arts. Practicing martial arts, you can not expect overnight success, in addition to the scientific method, you must also have persistence; Listening Comprehension practice is an iterative process, requiring long and arduous training to develop and bear fruit. Junior English teaching must increase efforts of listening teaching, and work diligently. Meanwhile, speaking and writing should work together to form an interaction and mutual promotion of the teaching system; students use the English language ability to make fully comprehensive improvement and development of training to meet the real needs of socialist modernization, and comprehensive ability to be English talents.