4．How to improve students’ ing ability---designing effective claroom activities
Among the four skills (listening, speaking, reading, writing), foreign language learners often complain that listening is the most difficult one to acquire.Teaching listening should focus on proce.
There are three stages in listening activities for language learners: pre—listening, while—listening, post—listening, which will discu in detail as follow:
4.1 Pre—listening activities
“Research points out that listening activity in general should consist of a pre—listening phase, which should make the context for listening explicit, clarify the purposes for listening, and establish goals, procedures and roles for listening.So a pre—listening activity can involve listeners in the following ways:
(1).By posing the tasks before the students listen to the topic, they are given a purpose for listening, which forces them to focus on selected information.
(2).The listener brings an orientation to a listening event.By opening up the topic, it arouses certain expectations and mentally prepares the students for the topic, it may also activate latest knowledge of vocabulary aociated with the topic.
(3).Activating learner’s scripts and tuning in their prior knowledge about the topic helps to relate their background knowledge to the topic to be heard, thus enhancing the comprehension and interpretation of the received meage.
(4).By brainstorming what they know about the topic before listening, learners will be able to compare what they know with what they are going to hear, and listen selectively.” [5] (p10)
4.1.1 Purpose
No le than in speaking, the listening proce means that the learner must be motivated by a communicative purpose .This purpose determines to a large extent what meanings they must listen for and which parts of the text are most important to them.For example, there may be parts where he does not need to understand every detail, but only to listen for the general gist.There may be other parts where a topic of special significant arises, requiring them to listen for more detailed information—for example, so that they can report about the topic to other members of a group.At other times, a task may require them to listen for specific pieces of information distributed throughout the text.
“The activities will be grouped according to the kind of response that the learner must produce:
(1)Performing physical tasks (e.g.selecting pictures)
(2)Transferring information (e.g.into tabular form)
(3)Reformulating and evaluating information” [6] (p67-68)
4.1.2Choose the appropriate materials
Before having the cla, teachers must choose and analysis the materials.“Teacher need to listen the tape all the way through .That way, they will be prepared for any problems, noises, accents etc.That way they can judge whether students will be able to cope with the tape and the tasks that go with it.” [7] ( p100)By doing so, the teacher will know the length of the materials, the difficult points and the focus of the materials, so the teacher can decide in advance how to go on with the teaching in cla.Of course, it is a demand for teachers if all other courses.But some teachers do believe that they can teach listening course without any preparation so long as they have the tapes and reference books.So some researchers would like to emphasize the importance of preparations for a cla: it is the basic need and also a basic insurance of an effective listening teaching.And the role of analyst, which means that teachers should analyze the functional patterns of the language used in the listening materials that students are to hear.The functions of a language can be simply divided into two patterns: the communication of emotion and the conveying of information.Communication of emotion means that the purpose of using a language is mainly for the establishment of harmonious relationship among the participants of social interaction.
4.1.3 Skills
(ⅰ)Prediction.
Research on speech proceing and interpretation suggests that the listener’s ability to make intelligent guees about what will come next plays a crucial role in their understanding of speech, and prediction is regarded by many researchers as on of the most powerful factors in comprehension.Therefore, a good listener is a good predictor.“By helping our students become better predictors, we are helping them become better listeners.”[8] ( p86)
Prediction also involves asking questions and answering them.According to Fisher and Terry active comprehension is proce of generating questions while reading and searching for answers to them.Questioning helps to establish the purpose and causes the listener to interact with the speech, confirming or rejecting expectations.
“Penny Ur summarizes five types of cues that listeners depend on for making predictions about continuation of an utterance:
(1) The stock formula of the language, such as clichés, idioms, quotations and proverbs.
(2).Stre on a particular word in the first part of an utterance is often explained or clarified by a comment in the second.
(3).The logical relationship between the first part of an utterance and the second is often signaled by a conjunction.
(4.) There is construction where the speaker proclaims in advance the kind of thing he is going to say.
(5).Rhetorical questions or bold, brief statements, particularly in the negative, are often followed by answers or amplification in the form of reasons, examples or explanations.” [9] (p11)
(ⅱ)Setting the scene
Another type of pre-listening activity is to set the scene for the students, for example: picture, video, TV etc.Listening to paages in the claroom can be more difficult than listening in real life, because of the lack of context .So the teacher can help provide the background information to activate learners’ schema or illustrate the picture to help students to understand the main idea, so they will be better prepared to understand what they hear.
(ⅲ)Listening for the gist
This type of the pre-listening activity is listening for the gist.It is very important to give students practice in this area, because in real life, they can not listen to the materials several times.Therefore, it will be impoible for them to catch all the information, so they need to be fit with some ambiguity in listening and realize that they can still learn even when they do not understand every word.Listening for the gist is familiar with skimming a paage in reading.The key point lays in let students some questions that focus on the main idea or the tone or the mood of the paage.Find whether students can answer the questions even though they can not understand each word or phrase in the paage.(ⅳ)Listening for specific information
There are situations in real life where they listen only for some specific details and ignore the rest of the entire meage.For example, when they listen to the weather report on TV, they are only interested in the temperature in the city where they live or where we plan to go on the holiday, or when they are sitting in a train station or an air port, they do not listen to the details of all the announcements.It is important to expose our students to a variety of type of listening texts for a variety of purpose so that they will develop a variety of listening strategies to use for different situations.
4.2 While - listening activity
This stage is the most difficult for the teacher to control, because this is where a student should pay attention and get the information actively.However, if the teacher can provide a reason, goal, or task for the learner, this should encourage and help students to focus their attention.In daily cla, students must use all aspects of personal listening ability.At the beginning of this article, we have discued the problems on students’ listening ability.
According to these problems, we must train the comprehensive listening ability in daily time.
Following are some special training
4.2.1 Listen and tick
A large part of what makes a listening task easy or difficult is what the teacher asks the students to do with the materials.If what students all need to do just is tick as they hear them, the task will be much easier.What you need to tick, you can hear them clearly.Because it is quite easy, ticking is very fit for the students who are in grade 7.It can encourage them to listen to the dialogue or paage carefully.
4.2.2 Listen and act
These activities relate to a method of teaching called Total Physical Response, which concentrates on learning language by listening and responding physical to commands or directions.Here is an example: “Beginning TPR
Procedure:
(1.) Have two students positioned to two chairs.
Commands supporting vocabulary
Stand upfastslowly
Sit downtablechair
Walkheadstomach
Stopdoorblackboard
Turn around
Touch
(2)pick two other students and add more vocabulary that are in the claroom--- such asbook, pencil, paper, desk, floor, teacher—and add to the commands put, place, scratch..
(3)use the following type of commands repeatedly in random order, rotating pairs of students from time to time, until you can see that all the students clearly understand what these commands and actions mean.For example:
Put the pencil on the book.
Scratch your head.
Scratch your stomach.
Put the paper in the box.
Put your hand on your head.
Place the box on the teacher’s head.
Scratch your head and stomach.” [10] (p11)
4.2.3 Listen and draw
This is similar to acting out physically, but in this type, the students are drawing picture, diagrams on paper.“This type of activity works very well as an information gap activity between pairs of students.” [11] (p90)One example: one student draws a simple picture and then tells his/her partner how to draw it in English .Neither partner can look at each other’s drawing during the task.After they have completed the task, they can compare their pictures to see how similar they are.
Other way: according to last example.
“Introduce the word draw.This opens up a rich network of things you can
ask your students to do.Start very simply with the familiar items that the students have already internalized through TPR.
For example:
Draw a table
Draw a chair
Draw a hand
Draw a box
Draw a hand on a door
Draw a window and a hand and book.”[12] (p11)
4.3 post --- listening activity
Post--- listening, teachers can determine how well the students have understood what they listened to, but it is important to design the tasks well.“One important point to keep in mind is whether we are testing the students’ listening comprehension or their memory.In fact, in real life, listener can remember the gist of the conversation, but cannot remember exactly what words were said.It is more natural to select and interpret what we hear rather than repeat everything we have heard.” [13] ( p187) .Here are some types of post—listening activity: multiple choice questions, answering questions, note-taking, gap—filling and dictoglo.“It is important to remember when designing activities not to demand that students remember more details the native-speaker would in a real life, because we do not want our students to get into the habit of thinking that they need to understand and remember.” [14] ( p117)
5.Conclusion
As teachers change their practice activity they gain new insights about the learning potentials of their students.“These succees have encouraged teachers to persevere in their efforts to design learning experiences that provide multiple entry and exit points for their students.” [15] ( p290-297)
During the exercitation in middle school, in fact, teachers did not teach the phonetics and phonology.Main practice on listening is just about the textbook.For example, GO FOR IT, the book has a small part for training listening.but the listening teaching is limited.It must add some activities.In the listening activities, according to the certain purpose, it can choose different skills: listen and act, listen and draw, and so on.These types of activities can be designed into games, which are popular for students.
Bibliography
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9.同2.p11
10.同 1.p11
11.同8.p90
12.同 1 p11
13.朱纯 外语教育心 [Z].上海:上海外语教育出版，1998.3.p187
14．王笃勤 教学策略论 [Z].北京:外语教学与研究出版社，2000.8.p117
15.章兼中 外语教育学[Z].浙江:浙江教育出版社，1999.p290-297 (责任编辑：admin)
