Zhu Limei
Shuguang school, Baoshan City, Yunnan Province.
Abstract: Language is an important tool with which people communicate with each other. People use languages to exchange thoughts, information so that they can understand each other well.And listening is the first important step in language communication.It is the key way for people to understand what they say. This paper, in view of the difficulties and barriers in village middle school students’ English listening, puts forward some suggestions for the English teachers to develop and improve their students’ listening comprehension in English teaching.
Key words: English listening teaching;；Difficulties in listening;；Village school；Improvement ；Listening comprehension.
摘要：语言是人们彼此沟通的一种重要的工具。人们用语言来交流思想、信息,以便他们能够更好地理解彼此。在语言交际中，听是最重要的一步，因为它是人们了解他们说什么最关键的方式。本文针对农村中学生英语听力的困难和障碍, 对英语教师在英语教学中发展和提高学生的听力理解能力提出一些建议。
关键词：英语听力教学；听力中的困难；农村中学；提高；听力技能。
1.Introduction
1.1 The Statements of English Listening
As we know, listening, reading, writing, speaking and translating are the five basic skills in language teaching and learning. Listening, one of the means of language communication is used most widely in our daily life. About three quarters of an adult’s time concerns listening. Listening plays the first and the most important role in learning a foreign language. It is investigated that listening contributes 45% of the actual situation to language application.Obviously it is an important mean of communication and an important channel of knowledge and information acquisition. The improvement of village middle school students’ listening comprehension is very helpful to the development of their abilities of speaking, reading and writing. Therefore, great importance should be attached to the improvement of students’ listening comprehension in English teaching in village middle school .
1.2The Situation of English Listening
In the village middle school , China, however, listening teaching has been neglected for a long time. What most teachers do in class is merely to play the recorder and check the answers. Some of them only try to help students to understand the content by constant stopping and repeating and explaining word by word. The training of listening has not been placed in its proper position in traditional teaching and hence listening has been a weak point. Many students think that listening is one of the most difficult things in English study, and even some of them have difficulties in understanding what their teachers teach in English. As the development of students’ listening comprehension has become the demand of middle school’s New English Curriculum Standard, nowadays the training of listening has drawn unprecedented attention than before.
1.3Survey about Study Background of Listening Teaching
On this account，I have done an oral survey in village middle school where I taught in April，2010. About 43.2% of the English language learning students think that the most boring and most difficult course is listening comprehension, and even some of them have difficulties in understanding the teacher who gives lessons in English. Of course, it is difficult for a middle school student to understand the listening material if he doesn’t have enough vocabulary and the ability of telling the grammar construction. In this survey, about 35% of the students with low listening comprehension think this is because they don't understand the knowledge about linguistics and they are not able to tell the meanings of what they have heard.
In another investigation，students were asked to listen to a dialogue of 244 words, in which the words and the related grammar have already been learned, but 80% of them thought it was too difficult. Then, using the same dialogue as a reading comprehension material, the author found that only 5% of them thought it was a little difficult. On the other hand the response ability is also another reason. It is clear that the reading speed of a material also affects. About 43% of the students thought that the material was read too fast and they just couldn't follow. A lot of students have their own listening habits. Some students often try to understand each word or each sentence. They will think hard when they meet some difficult words or sentences, while a great many students could understand the material directly. They often translate the English into Chinese in their mind, thinking that only in this way can the sentence be understood. This is also a reason, trying to understand each word is difficult, and it is not necessary at all. So there are so many factors affecting listening comprehension.
2. The Difficulties in English Listening
2.1 Difficulties in Language
There are some new words, new sentence patterns, new grammar, or connecting and weak reading, lost tone, stress shifting and so on in listening material. These changes add some difficulties to students’ understanding. We know，Language is first perceived through its sounds. We can find that during listening, “once we receive the pronunciation of a word, usually, things of pictures that the word stands for will come into our mind ”. Two major activities we do in listening comprehension : first, distinguishing sounds; second, making sense. So if a learner gets trouble in identifying the sounds, he or she will do in understanding as well. But，if
(1) The students are not familiar with the basic things in a language, so it’s difficult for them to understand. Such as words, phrases, verbs’ past forms, ect.
(2)The students don’t master the linguistics well, so it causes some understanding barriers. For example: the pronunciation is not accurate, especially for similar words. Such as: jeep-sheep; beat—bit; count—can’t; here—hair; much—march; quite—quiet; kitchen—chicken; mouth—mouse.
(3)The language speed varies and it causes some problems. When the listening material is quite easy for students, and the reading speed is quite slow, students won’t have any difficulty in understanding the materials. Yet, sometimes the listening materials are easy to students, but many students feel it quite hard to understand. Why?
1) Connecting reading. For example:
The cats are in the street.
The box is on the table.
Put some of it in the box and some of it in the bag.
2) Lost tone. For example:
Mary asked John to write soon.
Shake your head if you don’t want to go.
3) Stress. For example:
There’s a desk and a chair in it, too.
Put some of it in the box and some of it in the bag.
The above phenomena appear in materials which reading speed is quite fast and it makes students feel they are quite different from their linguistics and pronunciation. So they will make some mistakes when they meet with new words or when the speed is quite fast.
2.2 Difficulties in Vocabulary and Grammar
The influence of vocabulary is one of the important factors. Vocabulary is the building materials of languages, Vocabulary is central to people’s communication. Limited vocabulary must affect successful interpersonal communication. About 55% of subjects regard poor vocabulary as the largest hindrance during the process of listening comprehension. so students must master enough vocabularies if they want to improve their listening ability. A famous English phonetician DA Wilkins once said: “without grammar, people can’t express many things; but without vocabulary they can express nothing.” Many students’ listening vocabularies can not reach half of their reading vocabularies. Why? Because students use more English vocabularies than what they hear. They don’t pay more attention to the differences of sound. Some students only know the single meaning of some vocabularies, and neglect the implications of them. For this reason, even though they can hear some vocabularies clearly, students can’t understand the real meaning of them. For example, “Will you marry me?” Here the speaker wants to say “Can you host my wedding?” But some students understand in the way “Will you get married with me?” In order to understand the listening materials exactly, students must grasp the pronunciation, vocabulary, grammar and sentence patterns.
Although the grammar factor does not influence the listening comprehension as the others, but a good master of grammar rules can help a learner get a deeper understanding of a speech, especially when he or she meets with complicated or long sentences, such as the subjunctive mood, inversion, and so on. Let’s take an example: I should have come yesterday. If a learner well knows the function of the subjunctive mood, he or she can easily decode the implication of the speaker: he or she should come yesterday, but he or she did not. So,without the firm basic grammar, students will not catch the fleeting information. For example, “You should have finished it yesterday.” This is a subjunctive mood sentence. It means “You should have finished it yesterday, but you didn’t.” But some students don’t understand it correctly.
2.3 Difficulties in Content
The final goal of listening is to get a real understanding of a speech. Our effort to solve all the problems on pronunciation, vocabulary and grammar is just to reach the goal. No comprehension, no communication. Comprehensive barrier is presented in many different ways, such as failure to keep up the pace of the speaker, getting tired of a long speech, doing translation while listening, and catching words or phrases of a sentence, etc. Those are learners’ bad listening habits that take shape during the process of learning English. Some language researchers suggest that the leading reason for comprehensive understanding barrier is lack of effective listening skills, which should be focused on by the teacher in listening teaching.
Language is a kind of spiritual wealth which is created by humans. It’s a part of culture. It is like a mirror and reflects a nation’s culture.With language, people know well about the customs and habits, styles of life, and so on.
(1) The interference of the native languages spoils students’ reaction. When listening to a paragraph language, many students are used to translating each sentence into Chinese. They can’t make the language to form a scene or a picture in their minds,thus it affects listening reaction and understanding.
(2) Cultural differences affect students’ understanding ability. Although there are some similarities in English and Chinese culture, there are also great differences between them. Because not knowing about the life habits, cultural features, hobbies, Chinese students always feel that there are few new sentence patterns or words in the listening materials, but they don’t really catch the meaning of the sentences. For example: in Chinese “Where are you going?” is used in greeting, however it is thought to interfere in people’s privacy in English.
Listening to spoken English involves a wide range of topics, such as advertisements, news broadcast, plays, songs, speeches, conversations and other kinds of communication. “In terms of task, Buck’s introspective case study shows that comprehension is affected by the location of the question, that is, whether the question is given before or after the text, and the lexical items used.”
2.4 Difficulties in Background Knowledge
Background knowledge is an important factor that influences comprehension. Current views on listening comprehension agree that background or prior knowledge can affect listening comprehension. Cultural background knowledge, history and customs are important ones that can affect listening comprehension.
“Language is a kind of cultural expression. It is necessary for students to know some background about English countries, such as the history, culture, customs and habits, even life styles.” “Gaps in our knowledge of second language culture, of the associations and references available to native users, can present obstacles to comprehension.” Many students are lack of these kinds of knowledge, they think listening is very difficult.For example, there are two materials of the same difficulty. One explains something about China’s Spring Festival; the other is about Thanks Giving Day of the west countries. The former is easy to understand but the latter is more difficult, why? It is clear that the students know little about the latter.
2.5 Difficulties in Psychology
Many learners complain that they are afraid of attending listening class and usually feel nervous, tired and upset if they get bad performance in class. As well as their teacher, they find it difficult to help the students to get rid of the psychological barrier. We can see from that psychological barrier is commonly found in most English learners. Psychologist and methodological Krashan Steven calls it as “affective filter”. And from the point of his view, it is caused unconsciously by learners’ lack of confidence or anxiety over their ability. Psychological barrier includes difficulty to focus on the listening materials, easily becoming distracted, and too nervous to feel blank in mind, etc. Even worse, its influence may be amplified infinitely when the students meet with difficult listening materials or a tedious listening activity.
Listening understanding is a set of complex activities. Producing worried, nervous psychology is the greatest difficulty in listening training. Some students say, as soon as the listening is played, they become worried and afraid, even feel that they have nothing in minds. That’s the concrete show of the worried psychology. It directly affects the listening if students feel so nervous that they can’t concentrate their attention on listening training. They are afraid that they can’t follow the exam content and listening speed, so they are over worried. As a result, they seem to have nothing in mind. In the circumstance, there is not any continuity in the listening understanding and it leads to misunderstanding.
3. Development of Students’ Listening Ability
The English communication is based on the English listening by which people receive and understand oral information. The difficulty existing in hearing is trained to students, in the course of carrying on hearing and training, should start with respects such as training, guidance of method, choice of material, founding, cultivation of psychological quality of language environment of the basic training, make students establish confidence in improving hearing, dispel the psychology feared, carry on scientific training in a planned way.So both students and teachers are concerned about the English listening. By analyzing students’ listening difficulties and barriers, English teachers must pay more attention to students’ listening practice and seek for ways to solve these problems to improve students’ listening comprehension.
Therefore, at the beginning of listening comprehension lesson, it is important to train students’ ability of discriminating sounds. “To improve this kind of ability, students need to practice in hearing and saying the sounds of isolated words pronounced by a native speaker.”This kind of practice should be carried out through various activities, for monotonous practice for a long time may spoil students’ interest.
3.1 Teacher’s Role
For the part of teachers, he will act as a facilitator to help the students to understand the text; an adviser to recommend proper listening strategies and evaluator to assess the work they have done.”
Some useful tips are supplied to the teacher before entering the classroom:
—— Never go into listening without preparation.
—— Never ask students to memorize.
—— Don’t worry about every word.
—— Never give students the tape-script.
—— Don’t play the tape too often (three times should be enough).
3.2 Improvement of Students’ Pronunciation
Human speech sounds and the way they are articulated, and phonology deals with the sound system of a particular language. “According to an American scholar, Rita Wong, phonetics is crucial in listening comprehension. This is because sound is the direct medium of listening and speaking. Only by using correct sound, can we express our views and ideas accurately. Similarly, it is inevitably that poor pronunciation will cause aural difficulties in smooth acceptance of others’ ideas expressed in correct pronunciation.” Unfortunately, we found that many Chinese students lack basic knowledge of sound discrimination and phonetic changes, which severely hinders their improvement in listening ability.
The English listening comprehension takes the overall English level as the foundation. At the beginning step, one of the reasons why students can’t understand what they hear is that they can’t differ from some English words clearly, or the differences between their pronunciation and the pronunciation in different sentences. So at the beginning of the listening training, teachers must introduce something about connecting reading, weak reading, lost tone and stress shifting, and pay more attention to the pronunciation and intonation, so that students can overcome the barriers in English listening. Falling tone at the end of the sentence is always a statement. Rising tone at the end of the sentence is usually to ask questions, ask for something or feel uncertain about a statement. So don’t neglect the importance of language or go against the law of language learning in the English listening, or students will not achieve good effect in the English learning.
3.3 Improvement of Students’ Grammar
The English teachers should enhance the teaching of vocabulary, explore new ways to teach students vocabularies and make students interested in memorizing words. For example, ask students to learn some words by heart through sentences, which helps students to remember the meaning of the words and its morphological features and usage in a concrete language background. While teaching students vocabularies, teachers should let them fully realize that guessing the meaning of words is very important for them to understand the listening content. Teachers should pay more attention to training students’ ability to guess the meaning of the words through the whole passage, grammar structure, word formation and language environment. Keep training, students’ ability to apply vocabularies will be improved.
At the same time, never neglect the grammar teaching in English teaching. Its aim is to make students learn the basic structure, to practice listening, reading, speaking, and writing. To speak English correctly, students must master the language law; express themselves in the way of English speaking countries. Only in this way, can they make themselves understood, and reach the goal of communication.
3.4 Extending Students’ Background
Teachers must teach students to use English to think and not to translate sentence by sentence into Chinese, or it will affect their understanding. On the other hand, students must grasp some English and America history and the cultural background, something about English customs and life styles. Because of lacking this knowledge, students often have some trouble understanding the listening. If students don’t know about Thanksgiving Day, Easter, Foolish Day and so on, then teachers should give some introductions to them. Teachers should encourage students to read more books about humanities, geography, history, biography and so on. It can enrich their knowledge. For example, in the western countries, people are not allowed to ask something about marriage, child, job and salary. If students can overcome these cultural differences, they will improve their listening ability.
3.5 Development of Students’ Interests
There is a saying, “interest is mother of success.” No one can learn a foreign language well without being interested in it. “This interest, if maintained, will eventually become a kind of strong motivation for learning.” Undoubtedly, a learner is eager to listen to everything about English just because he or she likes it.? Just as he or she feels pleasant and enjoyable during the process of listening, he or she is willing to put his or her all effort into it and thus gets a quick improvement in listening comprehension.
Einstein ever said, “Interest is the best teacher”. As soon as teachers make students interested in listening, they can motivate their enthusiasm and initiative. Listening must be the beginning step of English learning. Practice listening and speaking together and students can improve the listening ability by speaking. At the beginning of the listening, teachers should explain to students in humorous and lively ways in class, using simple means, expressions and actions. Teachers can also use the simple pictures to help students understand. Sometimes it is necessary to combine the key content and write a few Chinese words on the blackboard. It is helpful to develop students’ listening understanding in this way. With the students’ listening level improved, teachers can choose some lively language, more interesting conversation stories, which can make students more interested in English listening.
There are different psychology barriers during the listening. Students always feel passive, not sure or afraid of without catching the meaning,they are over worried. For these reasons, they should have caught the meaning, but they didn’t. In fact English listening isn’t difficult if you believe in yourself. How to build the students’ confidence and how to help them to get rid of this fear, the teacher plays a crucial role. They should be aware of how to select some suitable listening materials (the degree of difficulty is just a little beyond the learners’ ability.) then the teacher will cheer up the students and encourage or motivate the students invisibly. Meanwhile, teaching is not testing, it is totally unnecessary for teachers to give students quizzes too frequently, which do nothing good but make them nervous.?
So teachers should remind them that they should not pay more attention to every pronunciation, word, sentence, or every detail; if not ,they will not understand the whole passage. Students should pay more attention to the content, not to the language; concentrate on the main meaning, not on details; concentrate on the present content, not on the past content. Keep relaxed and they will successfully understand the listening content.
4. Conclusion
In this article, I have discussed the internal and external factors that affect English listening comprehension and has suggested some positive solutions to improve them.We know, listening comprehension is a complex process. It involves pronunciation, vocabulary, grammar, language knowledge and so on. The listener cannot control the content or speed. Speech is not usually very organized and may contain redundancy, hesitation, ungrammatical utterances and sudden changes of topic. The size of vocabulary is small. Listeners sometimes fail to recognize the signals, or discourse makers in speech. Lack of cultural background of the target language might also lead to problems of interpretation. The causes of different individual’s listening comprehension obstacles vary, while we can still find some regulations or common problems they share together. So it is important to know about students’ listening barriers and adopt the right ways to solve these problems.
On the one hand, students must first have a good command of linguistic knowledge, and develop a good habit of listening, taking notes while listening. On the other hand, English teachers should spot out students’ problems during listening and accordingly, try to help them by giving appropriate information, background knowledge, setting proper tasks in and out of class and design various and interesting activities to improve their listening teaching; should explore new teaching methods and effectively improve students’ listening comprehension. Only in this way can the aim of English teaching be realized. However, there are still problems to be solved. Improving listening ability takes time and effort of both the teachers and students. I’m sure that as long as English teachers can be vigilant to these problems and try to help their students, listening proficiency will be greatly improved.
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