of cultivating students? interest in English. So students gradually lose the interest in English listening.
（4）Anxiety. Anxiety is commonly described by psychologists as a state of appreciation, or a vague fear indirectly associated with an object (Anderson & Lynch, 1988). Studies of the effects of anxiety on language learning show a negative relationship between anxiety and performance. Anxiety is often present when a language learner listens and speaks (Anderson & Lynch, 1988). Listeners usually have an unrealistic expectation to understand every word of a given spoken message. This expectation, when unmet, results in anxiety. Anxiety affects listening comprehension both indirectly through worry and self-doubt and directly by reducing participation and creating overt avoidance of the language.
（5）Personality. According to linguistics, the students? personalities have a significant influence on the improving of listening ability. For those students with an active and open character it is possible that their listening potentials can be explored and developed to their limit while those in depression or uneasiness will have more obstacles in developing their listening comprehension ability.
（6）Confidence. Students who live in an environment that is not good for English learning and lack of plenty of practice opportunities often find themselves lack of confidence and in self-contempt, especially those students coming from the villages, because of the poor learning environment and underdeveloped learning facilities, are unconfident about themselves, so are worse in listening comprehension. 3.3.2.3 Inappropriate Listening Habits
In doing listening practice, students tend to form habits as follows: First, many students do not have proper sitting posture in the process of listening; they just lean against the desk, or use one hand to support the head and another to hold the pen, which distract their attention. Second, they do not have the habit of combining listening, note taking and guessing together. Third, they try to understand every single word and every sentence. Once they come across pronunciations that they cannot understand they will focus their attention on these pronunciations, trying to figure their meanings out. As a result, this affects their listening of what comes next and
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accordingly the whole content of the listening material. Fourth, they have to rely on mental translating of what they hear to understand the listening material instead of being able to think in English. All these inappropriate habits are obstacles that affect the students? listening comprehension.
4. Strategies for Improving Teaching Listening
4.1 Teaching Listening Skills 4.1.1 Teaching Predicting Skill
Prediction is a preparation for students to listen. Teachers should teach students to predict the place, time, affairs, the relationship and question the material may present. Letting students know that the main idea often appears at the beginning or the end of a material, or appear in a transitional sentence.
The latest research on listening comprehension shows that the listener, in the process of listening comprehension, keeps on predicting what will come next by making use of his knowledge, experiences and the obtained information from the passage and checks his guesses with the new information so as to complete the correct understanding of the listening comprehension. So cultivating the predicting ability of students is helpful in improving their listening comprehension. Prediction is a preparation for students to listen. Teachers should teach students to predict the place, time, affairs, the relationship and question the material may present. Letting students know that the main idea often appears at the beginning or the end of a material, or appears in a transitional sentence. And teachers can teach students to predict form the following aspects: Predicting according to the topic sentences; Predicting according to sentence structures and functional words; Reviewing the choices and predicting questions; Making logical judgments according to related information; Deducing and summarizing what have been heard. 4.1.2 Teaching Note-Taking Skill
It is a good habit of noting down especially key words in the listening
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comprehension. Some students often found that they cannot concentrate on the listening comprehension and some cannot remember the content they have heard. So teachers should teach students to learn note – taking skill. Such as distinguishing the key words, like time, place, name, number and some useful expression form of structure. Besides, teachers should teach students to use the following abbreviations and symbols. For example: ef.: compare with. Eg.: for example. etc.: and so on. ∴: therefore, thus, as a result, so. ∵: because. ≠: is not equal, not the same as.↓: decrease, reduction.↑: growth, increase, rise. ←: come from, result from. → : lead to, cause, result in. +: plus, and, more. - : minus, less. 4.2 Arousing students’ Interest
4.2.1 Using Modern Multi-Media Facilities
With the fast developing of technology, multi – media teaching has become an inevitable trend. Multi-medias are the most advanced method in modern education technology, it greatly enriched teaching mode, teaching content and structure in the classroom, it is vivid and interesting and fascinating, which cause students? interest. So teachers should adopt such modern facilities, like computer, recording tape, recording video, English film and English music, TV, radio, slide, etc., to arouse students? interest.
4.2.2 Building an Intimate Relationship with Students
The class atmosphere is very important, and only when students and teachers have harmonious relationships can students really like listening class. So teachers should “become more like the skillful conductor of an orchestra, drawing the music out of the performers.”(Mao Qian, 2004) Students do not worry about the teachers? questions and commands. On the country, the teachers should not overcorrect the students? pronunciation and intonation while they are speaking. Practically, the teacher can be regard as the medium of the teaching but not the director of the teaching process while students play a leading role in English learning and also an active role by responding to the teacher.
4.2.3 Selecting Appropriate Listening Materials
The selecting of materials is essential for a successful listening class. When
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choosing listening material, teachers should choose them from easy to difficult gradually to enhance students? listening ability. The appropriate material is a good beginning of a listening class, which should have the following features: first, the material should have proper length of no more than three hundred words, because too long a period may easily distract students? attention from listening. Second, the material should be what the students are familiar or interested in. students are very familiar with what they face in their life, so teachers can choose materials related to their study, sometimes, there may be such materials that students know a little and are concerned, such as politics, sports and so on. Therefore teachers may choose either familiar or interesting material flexibly. Third, the materials should not be very difficult. A material filled with new words or extremely difficult sentences may easily make students giving up no matter how attractive the topic is. So teachers should start listening class with the listening materials at the “i+1” level (the level of difficulty is just a little beyond the learner?s ability), and such to make the listening class be reasonable and achievable.
4.3 Teaching Basic Language Knowledge
4.3.1 Teaching Students Effective Ways to Expand Vocabulary
Vocabulary, an integral part of a language, plays an important role in the process of English listening. However, most of students don?t use proper ways to remember English words and complain that it is hard for them to remember new words. So teachers can help them by using the following methods. First, asking students to remember words by using them in a context. One simple way of doing this is to make sentences by using particular words. Besides, letting students know that some words have not only one meaning but several meanings. So they have to learn not just the meaning and pronunciation of each word but how to use it, and to remember the meanings that are frequently used. Then, telling students to read extensively. Students can get acquaintance with the words they have learned through extensive reading, and learn new words by guessing meanings through the context. Last, asking students to combine the extensive reading and intensive reading together to remember those new words.
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4.3.2 Teaching Pronunciation
The primary task in improving students? listening comprehension is to train their pronunciation recognition ability. We can find that during listening, once we receive the pronunciation of a word, usually, things or pictures that the word stands for will come into our mind. It is obvious that a successful listener must be able to recognize pronunciation with accuracy and establish a corresponding model of pronunciation and meanings in his brain. As Hedge ( 2002, p. 230) describes: “In bottom-up listening process, we use our knowledge of language and our ability to process acoustic signal to make sense of the sounds that speech presents to us. In other words, we use information in the speech itself to try to comprehend the meaning. We segment speech into indefinable sounds and impose a structure on these in terms of words, phrases, clauses, sentences, and intonation patterns.”
While in middle schools, most students have pronunciation problems. So the teaching of pronunciation should be drawn enough attention, and teachers can do the following to help students.
（1）Get the students to know the importance of pronunciation of English. （2）Make the students be familiar with the names of the articulation organs, and explain how to pronounce the correct phonetic symbols.
（3）Introduce some basic knowledge of pronunciation, such as the linking of words, the sentence stress, rhythm ,intonation and so on. 4.3.3 Teaching Grammatical Knowledge
At the primary level of listening, listeners need to confirm the grammatical relations, time order, logical relations, rhetorical relations between words and phrases and recognize the parentheses. Krashen (Krashen, 1981) believed that the final goal of listening comprehension is to confirm the prepositions the speaker means to express in his speech but the prepositions are not directly expressed through the superficial structure of the speech. The listener can find the prepositions only by relying on two kinds of knowledge: syntax knowledge and knowledge form the outside world. Syntax knowledge helps the listener to form language pieces or elements with words of the speech so as to make up meaning. So we can say that grammar knowledge is
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