英语论文网

Chapter I Introduction

1. Research Background
Listening as a fundamental language learning element plays an important role inlanguage performance. In a normal day, listening is twice used as much as speaking andfour to five times as much as reading and writing (Rivers, 1984). Comprehension approachholds the view that “ the teacher ought to spend some time in helping learners trainlistening before practicing speaking. If listening proficiency is enhanced, learners’ overalllanguage level will be improved accordingly.”(Richards,Platt 1998:80). Thus, thesignificance of improving listening ability is apparently revealed.The English Teaching Syllabus for College English Major issued by the Ministry ofEducation also states the requirement of getting a knowledge of the core meaning andintended meaning in utterance. Listening comprehension essentially is to understand theutterance of the speaker. However, the process of listening is a complex procedure todecode, cognize and reason. Audiology aims at developing listeners’ comprehensivecompetence of analyzing, reasoning, judging and reorganizing the utterance in order tograsp the authentic thought of the speaker, which demands learners to have certain abilityto analyze ,reason and combine context with the real meaning of the utterance.In a traditional listening class in China, the teacher just sits in the front of theclassroom, checks answers after several times listening. If the listeners work out the correctanswers, there is no further explanation on the reason why listeners choose this answer.Only when listeners get the wrong answers, the teacher will make a detailed explanation onit. Mostly, the teacher pays more attention to the vocabulary and sentence explanation.Thus, teacher’s failure to comprehend listening stimuli is exclusively attributed to“language-specific deficits” (Carrell & Eisterhold, 1983: 554). In this circumstance,successful listeners are measured by correct responses to questions or tasks. It is obviouslythat the teacher only focus on product not process, because they always pursue outcomesof listening instead of listening content.
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2. The Significance of the Study
As for previous researches and studies, most are focusing on some traditional andconservative approaches on listening teaching, and their research purposes are undoubtedlyto improve students’ listening scores mechanically. However, the purpose of this researchis to make a comprehensive consideration on the application of a newly teachingapproach—participatory approach, in order to explore whether participatory approachcould improve listening ability for English Majors; whether participatory approach couldbe more effective and motivating than traditional listening teaching for English majors;whether participatory approach could realize all students’ participation in listening class.For the theoretical significance, this research on the participatory approach Englishteaching can enrich and complement the college English listening teaching theories.Traditional language teaching theories emphasize more on how to teach, the design of thecoursebook and methodology but neglecting learners’ authentic needs and learning status.However, the participatory teaching approach can effectively organize the college Englishteaching more comprehensively and profoundly in the angel of the learners attempting toget a knowledge of the classroom participation situation and establis