speaking in the communication activity. ·Common nerve physiology foundation
According to the composite circulation pattern of communication, the process of oral communication may be regarded as the transmission between internal psychology of both sides and the exterior spoken language. The two aspects interact with each other. In simple terms, the speaker has the meaning be produced in cerebrum first, through the process of information-carrying, information extraction, information-processing, the meaning was converted into corresponding lansign. At last, nervous system sends out the pronunciation instruction which let the vocal organs complete the expression of meaning. These sound marks are transmitted to the listener by taking the air as media. Listener converts the sound into corresponding acoustic image with the organs of hearing, through the information decoding, transforms it into the corresponding meaning, and then stores it into the memory. Thus, an oral communication process was completed. The cerebrum, the aural organs and the vocal organs comprise the nerve physiology foundation of listening and speaking and promote mutually, develop coordinately. ·Common communicative environment
The Relevance Theory which put forward by Sperber and Wilson pointed out the close relationship between listening and speaking. It took Human beings communication activity as the cognition activity and demonstrated that the reason why speaker’s goal or intention can be distinguished by listener in communication is that, they agree on the cognition environment. Speaking and listening are all performed in superposition part of both sides’ cognition environment.
·Common cognition physiology foundation
Memory is the complex thinking phenomenon and is the foundation of human beings’ cognition. The reason why brain can complete the convertion between sound and meaning is just because of memory.
The simplest pattern for information processing is “input-memory-output” . Listening and speaking process the information which stored in memory according to the same pattern, which I “stop-down”, “bottom-up” and interact with each other. The“bottom-up”pattern means that when the sensory information entering into feeling system, the brain
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will carry on the processing and identify the letters and expressions as well as the relationship between them, finally get the words. On the contrary, the“top-down”pattern starts with the general conception. It applies the related knowledge to guide the specific sensory information, specific expressions, the syntax relationship, and carries on the processing.
3.2 Mutually Promoted ·Comprehension
Most students with poor English listening always claim that they are not able to tell the meanings of what they have heard. The reason is they have low comprehension level. Rost mentioned that comprehension has been regarded as the most essential aspect of listening. It is“the process of relating language to concepts in one’s memory and to the references in the real world”. That is, a listener connects the already-heard knowledge to his relevant experience. This requires that we enrich our knowledge of English. Students should listen to more English materials since listening is the most immediate way to acquire knowledge. Through listening, you can accumulate more background knowledge of English which makes your own “background knowledge” more closer to the “ new-focal” information. In addition to a lot of listening, we also need to practice speaking more. Whorf (1956) asserts that the categories and relations that we use to understand the world originate from our particular language. Speakers of different languages conceptualize the world in different ways. Language acquisition would be learning to think, not just learning to talk. When we are talking, we are also training our way of thinking which will make the “relate” easier. From this perspective, speaking promotes listening. Meanwhile, speaking is also efficiently improved through this process. ·Response ability
In an investigation, students were asked to listen to a dialogue of 244 words, in which the words and grammar have already been learned. But 80% of them thought it was too difficult. Researchers then took the same dialogue as a reading comprehension material. It turned out only 5% of students thought it was a little difficult. It is clear that response ability affects listening, about 43% of the students thought that the material was too fast to follow. Students usually practice English in written form which causes them bound up to
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grammatical rules and have no sense of language.
When listening, they need to translate the foreign language into their mother language that they are familiar with. How to solve this problem? The answer is to practice speaking as often as possible. By doing this, you will be very familiar with the phonetic, the rhythm of speech and the characteristic of pronunciation. When you heard English, your brain will produce a kind of conditioned reflex which would help you to understand the meaning of English immediately. Furthermore, being familiar with the phonetic, speech and pronunciation is also very helpful for you to distinguish the small differences between homophones, through which you can improve the accuracy.
4. Current problems in English listening and speaking
4.1 In Listening Aspect ·Poor basic knowledge
Everyone knows that basic knowledge is of great important. And many people regard it as the base of the tall buildings. So it is obvious that a grasp of basic knowledge is necessary. For example, you can not understand what you have listened, even though you are familiar with the words. As a result, it seems to be easy, but you still fail to follow it. And the same sentence can be expressed in different ways. If so, it has to be a challenge to understand it. No input, no output. If you have not store enough for the cold winter, how can you live through it and enjoy the happiness of the spring? ·Lack of English environment and interest
We know the largest difference between mother language learning and foreign language learning is the environment. A child can soon learn his mother language well. He has heard a lot before he can say something and walk. Then after he is able to walk and say, he has a chance of listening to more. Before he goes to school, he has already been a good listener and speaker. But for a foreign language, you can meet it only in formal places, classes, for example, otherwise, you can hardly have a chance to meet it. As a student, I have learned English for more than ten years. Frankly speaking, I can not communicate with English-speaking foreigners very easily.
How about other Chinese people in English-speaking countries? Yao Ming, a
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basketball player in NBA, entered NBA in 2002 with a translator for helping him communicate with American people. But after about 2 years, Yao “fired” his translator because Yao did not need him any more. He could communicate with others in English very easily. Another famous Chinese person, Zhang Ziyi, world wide famous movie actress, had hardly learnt English before she started to act in Hollywood. But now she can speak English very well after working hard and living in USA for several years and successfully finds a rich boyfriend Vivid in America.
How could this happen? It must have something to do with the English environment. I have some friends and classmates who study abroad. Most of them went to study after National College Entrance Examination in China. After studying about two years abroad, some of them can easily talk with English-speaking foreigners. Living abroad, they have more opportunities to listen, to think, to speak while it is almost a luxury in China. I do not mean that we all should go abroad to study English. What I want to say is that the English learning environment is very important to us.
On the other hand, English learning is important but it does not mean everything. If you do not have the willingness to learn, the good environment means nothing to you. You are always too bored to pay enough attention to the listening materials. English learning environment and willingness are both necessary while studying English. ·The wrong pronunciation
It is sure that you can not understand the listening articles when you have the wrong pronunciation, especially the quick speed of it. Sometimes, it even involves lots of pronunciation phenomenon. Therefore, only when accurate to remember the pronunciation, can we understand what it says. ·Cultural background differences
It often occurs that you can listen something that you never have listened. For example, there are specialized terms, place names and traditional stories. In my investigation, about 35% of the students with low listening comprehension thing this is because they do not understand or know the knowledge about linguistics; they are not able to tell the means of what they have heard. Pay attention to the western culture. It is also very important.
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·Psychological quality and skills
With the development of the society, more and more people pay great attention to the psychological test. They always talk about it in spare time. Frankly speaking, psychological quality affects the whole of our life. As a student, we must control our emotion when we take any examination. But many students complain that they feel nervous as soon as they pick up the headset. How to do this? It is impossible to be devoted when somebody is nervous. Especially at the beginning of the listening, the students have not been ready. In addition, we had better make full use of the brain. It means to master good skills. The ability of distinguishing the important information is in great need. If you are clever enough, you will not miss the main words. 4.2 In Speaking Aspect
Currently, the foreign language teaching of the primary and secondary education emphasis on grammar and language knowledge in general, almost all the people, including parents and teachers, think that the main objective of learning foreign language is to get a high score and enter a better school, the students will ignore the learning of spoken English, of course. So after seven or eight years learning, a considerable number of students’ speaking ability is still very weak and still dumb in English. Not until they are admitted to college do they realize the importance of oral English, but they still do not know how to improve their spoken English. I think the followings are the main reasons of making students’ spoken English ability lagging behind. ·Lack of language environment
English language environment has a great influence on improving of students’ spoken English level. Since the foreign language learners do not live in the country that the language is said, they do not need to practice the foreign language they have learned in order to communicate with others. There is also no need to worry about shopping or traffic problems in real life resulting from language barriers which will cost a lot of their thought. Therefore, outside the classroom environment, English language learners hardly use the English to communicate for the lack of the test, because testing is an important part in their study. While some teachers think that it is a waste of time to spend time listening speaking English for the vast majority of students do not have the opportunity to exchange with
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