to what has been said\many scholars have devoted themselves to experiments and studied in various listening classes. After decades of hard work, they have revealed that pre-listening activities can provide learners with necessary knowledge, connect the new content more meaningfully to prior knowledge and get them psychologically prepared in their immediate listening process .Meanwhile, the activities can foster learners' interests, create positive atmosphere and stimulate them to learn more in a listening class.
1.1What are the pre-listening activities
There are many different kinds of pre-listening activities in English listening learning. Such as pair work, role play, predicts content, play games, introduce the background information, learning vocabulary and so on. With these pre-listening activities, teachers can teach listening easier, and students can get knowledge directly.
1.2 The aims of this study
As we all know ,listening plays an important role in English learning .In order to research effective pre-listening activities for improving students' listening ability, I made this study. My study aimed at finding out the effective pre-activities to generate the students' interests, building the students' confidence, and facilitating their comprehension to the listening materials.
1.3 The significance of the study
Some teachers neglect the importance of the pre-listening activities in their teaching of listening comprehension, though it has been claimed that pre-listening activities can improve learners' listening comprehension .To help learners benefit more from the research achievements, this thesis first reviews and analyzes the theories and studies related to listening comprehension and then the researcher designs an experiment to investigate the influence of pre-activities on students' listening comprehension.
Generally speaking, adequate pre-activities can more or less smooth the way for students' overcoming the listening barriers and improve their listening comprehension
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ability to some extent .Based on the findings, the thesis puts forward impli8cations for teaching listening at middle school students.
2. The background information of pre-listening activities
Different researchers have put forward different aspects of listening strategies and different kinds of pre-listening activities.
2.1 What teachers do in pre-listening?
Baker(2004.3) stated that in《 Pre-listening activities and English listening comprehension》,he thought teacher should do the following things:
(1)Tell students they should not worry that they have to understand every word they hear. Not every word is important.
(2)Where possible, make sure students know what they are listening for before you start listening .Explain they should focus only on the information they need.
(3)Give two or three general questions to check students’ comprehension of the basic details.
(4)Conclude students' idea on the topic they are going to listen to. This will help focus them.
(5)Don't choose a listening that is too long .If necessary, stop the recording at certain points and review what students have understood so far.
2.2 Gareth Rees' research result
Gareth Rees (2004) investigative that pre-listening activity is the necessary preparation to improve listening effects. Gareth Rees conducted that in the first language we rarely have troubles understanding listening. But in a second language, it is one of the hardest skills to develop dealing at speed with unfamiliar sounds, words and structures. It is even more difficult if we do not know the topic under discussion, or who is speaking to whom. So, simply asking the students to listen to something and answer some questions is a little unfair, and makes them develop listening skills much harder. He put forward the following pre-activities in the text《Pre-listening activity help students to improve listening effects》: (1) Setting the context
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This is perhaps the most important thing to do even most exams give an idea about who is speaking, where and why. In normal life we normally have some ideas of the context of something we are listening to. (2) Predicting content
Once we know the context for something, we are able to predict possible content. Try giving students a choice of things that they may or may not expect to hear, and ask them to choose these they think will be mentioned. (3) Pre-learning vocabulary.
For students, large numbers of unknown words will often hinder in listening. Select some words for the students to study before listening, perhaps matching words to definitions, followed by a simple practice activity such as filling the gaps in sentences .It is useful to strengthen the students' comprehension to the listening materials.
2.3 How to launch the pre-listening activities effectively.
Esther P .Huang (2005) held the position that how to launch the pre-activities effectively .He thought that carrying on a conversation is not just about hearing the words and saying the right words. Knowing where ,when ,who, how and why can help the listener understand the conversation better .Being able to determine setting, interpersonal relations ,mood and topic of a certain \\help the listener comprehend more of what is going on, and in turn, enhance the chance of successful predicting ,hypothesizing ,and intervening. The goal of this activity is to heighten students' listening awareness of how changing certain words or tones can create different meanings .It includes the following ways in the text《How to use the pre-listening activity effectively》: (1)Prior knowledge
Students will need to know the meaning of settings, interpersonal relationships, mood, and topic before embarking on this activity. They will need to understand different factors that create different setting, interpersonal relationships, moods and topics.
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(2)Purpose
Students will use different tones and expressions in different settings and situations even though the word phrasings are the same .Students in the audience will listen for changes in tones and subtle word changes to detect how the changes alter the situation. (3) Procedure Teacher Presentation:
The teacher will write \means. The teacher will put the expression in different ways, discuss the different settings, interpersonal relationships, mood, and topic that fit with the expression, and suggest possible responses for each expression. (4)Pair works
In pair, the students will be assigned different expressions. The partners will come up with three different ways to say the phrase and corresponding responses to each expression .The students will also give a possible background to each expression. (5) Demonstration
Each pair will present their dialogues in front of the class. The audience can guess the different plots to the dialogues and give feedback. Then the partners can explain the rationale for their expressions and the corresponding responses to each expression.
3. Research Design 3.1 The subjects of survey
I went to XingHu Middle School to do my questionnaire survey. I selected
120 students from three classes of Grade Eight. The students in these three classes had learned English for 5 years. I had my practice teaching in this school and at the same time intended to understand the students' situation of using pre-listening activities for listening
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All students from Grade 8 in the school are potential participants in this study. However, considering the large number of students (120students)in this school, the choice of the questionnaire survey must be careful.
3.2 The instruments of the research
It is an instrument of survey in my questionnaire about \activities do middle school students use in the listening class?\the pre -listening activity effectively? \literature review's descriptions. I according to XingHu middle school students' actual situation and design this survey, and the answers don't include their names, because I only finding questions and research these questions.
3.3 Research methods
According to the questionnaire survey and my observation, I asked these students to complete the questionnaire survey (see appendix) in limited time, every question is about the pre -listening activities and I advise them to draw their actual answers. I adopt observation to know which pre -listening activity they prefer to .Next, I gave back the questionnaire survey .At last, I made a statistic and analysis it, got the result (see table).
3.4 Research questions
In order to find the questions’ answer .I made this investigation of English pre-listening activities for middle school.
(1)Does the teacher use pre-listening activities before listening?
(2)Which pre-listening activities do middle school students use in the listening class?
(3)Which pre –listening activities are better in they adopted?
3.5 Research process Step1
I selected three classes of grade 8 In XingHu Middle School. They have learned English for 5 years. In practice of this middle school. And in order to
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