understand the students’ situation of their listening. I observed and noted down the pre-listening activities in my English teaching and I found the rural middle school students were lack of flexibility in English using. They were also lack of the listening skills. By analyzing, I thought it was mainly for the listening skills and they did not pay more attention to the pre –listening activities .In order to find out the effective pre-listening activities, I made a questionnaire to study it.
Step2
According to the step1, I understand more situations of students’ .And I based on the students practical situations. I first wrote a questionnaire which includes 12 questions about the pre-listening activities (see appendix).I also asked the three classes students to fill it. Then I counted the students situations of their using the activities.
The statistics as following: Table 1
人数 问题 1 2 3 4 70 40 60 38 35 65 40 70 A. Yes B.NO C.I know 15 15 20 12 Don’t 11
5 6 7 8 9 12 70 40 34 76 62 85 29 65 65 28 50 17 21 15 21 16 8 18 I count the rate of yes and no of the 120 students. The results as following:
Table 2 Rate (%) Questions 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 58.3% 33.3% 50% 31.7% 58.3% 33.3% 28.3% 63.3% 51.7% 29.2% 54.2% 33.3% 58.3% 24.2% 54.2% 54.2% 23.3% 41.7% A. Yes B.NO 12
12 70.8% 14.2% 4 Research results and the discussion
4.1 Research the results
After I analyzed the statistics, I arrived at the following findings. From question 1,I found the rate of yes are higher than no .It showed the most students like English very much. From question 5, the rate of yes is 58.3% and it is higher than the rate of no (24.2%).It showed the rural middle school students made their efforts, they tried to learn English listening well. From question 2,3,4,,the rates of yes are lower than no ,it showed that there was a big problem in English listening class, most students like English very much ,but they are afraid of English listening. From 6,7questions,the rates of yes are lower than no ,it is 33.3%-54.2%,28.3%-54.2%,it showed more students believed that after they took efforts and used the good ways and skills ,they could improve their English listening. From question 9,the rate of yes is 51.7% and it was higher than the rate of no(41.7%).It showed that students need different pre-listening activities in listening class. And these activities will useful in it. From question 12.we see the rate of yes is 70.8% and it is higher than the rate of no(14.2%).It showed that before students listening, they hope teacher do something make them understand the context, and after pre-listening activities, they felt listening easier than before.
The statistic also showed the students express the English listening is so difficult that they need many kinds of pre-listening activities to help them, such as pair work, role play ,predict content ,play games and so on.
4.2 The discussion about the reasons of rural middle school students felt listening difficult
4.2.1The students' mentality-obstacles
Students are afraid of English listening, the most important reason is that the students believe that they do not well in English listening because of their anxiety and
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nervousness .They can not pay more attention to the context when listening, they don’t believe they can do it well, the results are that they don’t understand what others are saying.
The rural middle school students are most of introverts and they are lack of confidence. So teachers should encourage them and do more interesting exercises to help them learn English listening.
4.4.2 Less vocabulary influence the listening effects
The students of Grade 8 have learned English for 5 years, but they learned less vocabulary, and most of them are easy. But in some listening materials, the vocabulary is difficult to students .This is another important reason that students felt listening difficult.
4.4.3 Teachers’ teaching listening lack of pre-listening activities
For Chinese students, they can hardly find an English-speaking environment. As a result, they can listen little English except English class .What’s more, in traditional English teaching, listening is limited to the integrated teaching which centers the sentence structures and dialogues .Obviously, the input of the information is not enough. So we need various listening activities. Teachers should organize various listening activities rather than play the tape-recorder only to do exercise.
4.3 The pre-listening activities for improving the students' listening ability
The following are some common ways used in English listening classes that can effective improve the rural middle school students’ listening ability (1) English oral report.
It refers that at the beginning of the class, the teacher does not pick up the text of materials in a hurry as soon as the bell rings. Teachers leave about three minutes for the students who are on duty to give an English oral report to the class about the weather, the date, etc. As time goes on, they can extend their topics to a short story
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telling jokes, films, games, songs, etc. This activity can make the classroom teaching interesting and attractive. It is particularly important at the beginning of the course. The students will become very active, they can help listening and speaking. As a result their ability of listening will develop.
(2) Game.
Playing games which are proper to the students’ language level and age according to the teaching contents is an important way to develop their listening, such as “guess” “intelligence competition ”etc, which trains the students’ listening from all ways.
(3) Listening competition.
Listening competition means to compete between desk mates, groups of several students when listening a material .It can easily arouse students’ interest and take part in the activities .It can also improve the effect of listening .After the competition; teachers can give some prizes to encourage those who succeed in the competition.
(4) Listening with partners.
Competition and cooperation go hand in hand. Just as the Chinese old saying, many hands provide grate strength .Listening with partners make one understand better, partners provide information that one needs but missed. Discussions among partners may help one find more valuable things than expected. In addition to that, listening with partners can take one out of the dull self-listening; keep one from sleepiness, accompanied by tedious training.
5 Conclusions
I can arrive at some findings from this survey. The major finding is that pre-listening activities have some effects on listening comprehension. Teachers should choose different pre-listening activities according to different listening aims in listening classroom.
The effective pre-listening activities are pair work, introduce the background information. Role play, predict content, play games .learning vocabulary, etc.
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