On Vocational Students’ Listening Obstacles and Strategies

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Abstract：English listening is one of the most important but the most difficult parts in English teaching. It is not only the main way of acquiring language information , but the base of improving other skills. However, during the College English teaching and learning process, teaching of listening has been the difficult point, troubling teachers and students, So, improving students’ listening skill is the current problem to be solved by the teachers. In this article, based on my observations, questionnaires and interviews in classes for many years, I found out some barriers of English listening existing among my students. Therefore, I put forward some listening teaching strategies and methods to improve College students’ listening skill.

Key words：vocational students；listening；obstacles；strategies

中图分类号：H319 文献标识码： A 文章编号：1672-1578（2013)02-0003-03

1 Introduction

It is believed that listening, speaking, reading, and writing are four basic skills in language teaching and learning. Sequentially, listening is essential for developing other skills and provides a basis for language learning. Many linguists have given an extraordinary exposition about listening importance. The famous linguist Rivers（1984） has offered us a set of data in his works: In people’ daily communicative activities,45% rely on listening; only30% depend on speaking;16% come from reading and 9% rely on writing. It is obvious that listening plays the leading role in language study.

2 Research Backgrounds and obstacles

Presently, owing to the characteristics of public English in our school--large capacity ，less hours and the traditional listening devices--tape recorders. the teachers take up too much time in class so that the students don’t have enough time and opportunities to get listening training, and the common procedure of English listening class is that the teacher first let the students listen to the tape , and then finish the test, which is called a testing method rather than a teaching method by McDonough, an English linguistic. Under these traditional teaching modes, students have been playing passive roles and have less interest in listening class, teachers often feel it difficult to give the listening class smoothly. As time goes by, students cannot get the complete listening training and their limited listening skill has restricted their further development in English. So it is urgent to find some effective methods to improve students’ English listening skills .

Based on my interviews and observations in class, I have found that there are the following listening obstacles existing among my students:（1）Neglecting English Listening. （2）Poor Phonetic Knowledge.（3）Vocabulary and Grammatical Knowledge Deficiency.（4）Lack of Reading Amount and Reading Speed. （5）Bad Listening Habits.（6）Poor English Basis and Insufficient Knowledge Accumulation.（7）Lack of Cultural Background Knowledge.

3 Strategies

3.1Stimulating Students’ Interest and Motivation

Interest and motivation are the first step to success in studying, which make people’s study become a purposeful and conscious activity. So the teacher should try hard to stimulate students’ interest, arouse their learning attention and fully mobilize their enthusiasm by using all kinds of teaching methods etc. Specifically, there are the following ways: （1）A good set of teaching materials can stimulate students’ interest in learning and motivation. Teachers should choose proper material based on the student's language learning stage and different needs. （2）Teachers should pay attention to the input of non-language information. For example, teachers should create a lively, interesting, realistic listening environment while doing listening practice and design a variety of listening activities.（3）Fully respecting each student ‘s cognitive difference and understanding their different thinking.(Tao Yukang,2008, 5). Only by understanding and respecting students’ cognitive style can teachers combine their own teaching and students’ needs to establish good relationship.（4）Paying attention to the introduction of new lesson to evoke students’ interest in learning English. "A good beginning is half done". if a teacher can create suspense or a certain situation by interesting language or enlightening facial expressions from the very beginning , it will easily induce students’ interest and create the lively class atmosphere.

3.2 Strengthening Pronunciation and Vocabulary Teaching

Pronunciation is closely related to other parts of language like vocabulary and grammar, etc. If students can pronounce every word well, they will memorize the words and recite the English articles smoothly. English Pronunciation has a great effect on listening comprehension , which has been confirmed by a lot of experts and scholars. Wang Yingfang (2008,1) thinks that pronunciation and intonation have a significant impact on listening comprehension in many aspects. For people from English-speaking countries do not stress each syllable in the process of their speech but more of a continuous speech flow, which produces such voice characteristics as linking strong and weak voice and assimilation between two adjacent voices. In addition , Intonation also can not be ignored. Intonation’s major roles in language Communication (Liu Longgen, Hu Kaibao, 2008), include：（1） Emotional expression. （2）Marked structure.（3）Transmission of information.（4） Cohesion and coordination between the large part of discourse. （5）Segmentation of information. 6.Identification of information.

In view of this， the teacher should add to some knowledge of phonetics ， In the words teaching, teachers should add to knowledge of some voice. Many students, even after six years of secondary school language learning, still have not accepted phonetics study systematically. Therefore it causes a major obstacle to language learning, leading to students’ not pronouncing correctly, which makes them fail to communicate with others, be difficult to understand each other's words, lose interest in learning English, or eventually become a dumb English learner.

In addition, vocabulary is the basic material of a language, whose impact on listening shouldn’t be neglected. First, frequency usage of words has a direct impact on listening comprehension. Second, The impact of "Word cluster(series of words collocation)” Third, Understanding of key words has a great impact on the Listening comprehension(Liu Longgen, Hu Kaibao, 2008).

Therefore, teachers should pay more attention to words teaching and introduce the appropriate ways to memorize new words. 1. Memorize new words according to wordforming,such as m-, dis-, ir-, en-, and so on. 2. Memorize new words through association.（1）The association of the sound and the shape, Such as: food, foot, good; light, night, tight,… （2）The association of shape and meaning. such as: In “banana”, those “a” can be regarded as one banana or another.（3）Context memory.（4）Memory of words by cutting. we can divide a word into several parts to memorize in accordance with its constitution to deepen the impression and increase interest to remember words. Such as: “passage” can be decomposed into” pass + age” ;” single”--” sing”+”le”, etc.

3.3 Strengthening Grammar Teaching.

Grammar is the foundation of English level, If a word is a cell, then grammar is the skeleton, It can help us to catch the implication of the discourse, and understand them well, and it is the essential condition of a whole passage comprehension, It is also a comprehensive term of sentence rules, which is helpful for students to understand the meaning of sentences, divide sense groups correctly and improve the reaction to language. If you don’t have a solid foundation on grammar, you can not recognize the sentence structure and can not understand the meaning of a sentence, let alone understand the complex sentences. Through reading, the students should be instructed to learn to find grammar points, analyze grammar phenomena, grasp various sentence structures and their characteristics with grammar and summarize grammar, cultivating students’ sense of listening and their ability to grasp the grammar structure.

3.4 Paying Attention to Reading Speed and Skills’ Training

The amount and the speed of reading will have a direct effect on improving listening skill .Reading can help learners to be familiar with syntactic structures, be affluent in the knowledge of cultural backgrounds,and promote the development of thinking ability. Teachers should guide students to develop good habits of reading:（1）Pay attention to the training of reading comprehension. The teacher can take 7 to 8 minutes to give the students reading practice and let them do 5 to 10 testing problems within the stipulated time through reading materials to improve the students’ reading speed.（2）Correct the bad habits of reading. Teachers should correct the bad reading habits of the students such as reading only one word at a time, paying excessive attention to wording, referring to the dictation while reading and analyzing word by word or sentence by sentence, and so on.（3）According to the theory of “Top-down model”(Tao Yukang，2008), pay attention to developing students’ reading skills such as extensive reading, time-limited reading, skim and skip reading etc. to broaden their knowledge and develop their complex thinking and their skills of guessing new words from the context.

3.5 Cultivating Good Listening Habits

（1） Before giving the listening lesson, the teacher should introduce some new words and the relevant background knowledge, then let them read the given materials and problems first and finally guide them to listen to the tape with the problems so that they can aim at the main points and avoid excessive emphasis on each word and details ,resulting in the misunderstanding of the whole text.（2）During the process of listening ,the teacher should also require the students to take notes of those key words and important data in order not to forget them.（3）Overcome the excessive tension. During the Listening process, one must pay highly attention to it. So he or she should try to overcome the excessive tension. There is no need to be panic and to struggle if encountering new words. For single word will not affect the whole sentence or discourse understanding, Just give up the words and sentence you do not understand, and pay attention to the content behind.（4）Training of English thinking. During the daily process of learning English, the learner should learn to think in English to establish direct links between objective things and English and try to avoid translating every sentence into Chinese ,for not all the English words can have relevant Chinese meaning.

3.6 Adding to Some Appropriate Cultural Background

Cultural background can be divided into two categories: knowledge of cultural and communicative culture, including socio-cultural habits and cultural characteristics of ethnic terminology and vocabulary of communication, such as your name (Name), hello (Greeting), grateful language (Thanking), Farewell (Farewell), etc.

Because of language and cultural differences in cross-cultural communication, people understand the words of others according to their own way of thinking, cultural background and language customs. Their failure of understanding the cultural differences will produce language barriers(Yue Wenying 2010 ). For example, students hear the "green" word, they only think of "green, a color" while In the sentence "He is a green young man.", they can not know the meaning "immature"; "in the big apple" is not "in the big apple", but "in New York"; "You are a lucky dog. " means curse words, etc.

Thus, the lack of cultural background knowledge will have barriers to students’ listening comprehension, listening teaching is closely related to cultural background knowledge. Teachers should pay attention to the introduction of cultural knowledge to improve the cultural sensitivity, and make students recognize the importance of cultural knowledge in listening comprehension.

4 Conclusion

In short, there are many factors affecting English listening teaching and listening skills. The improvement of listening skills cannot be reached in one step, just as Rome was not built in a day, it is a gradual and complex process and is a very important and hard job, The teachers should change the traditional teaching mode, adopt some listening strategies to arouse the students’ interest in learning and their strong motivation, help the students overcome all the barriers, correct their bad listening habits and make them enrich and expand vocabulary and the cultural background knowledge of language consciously so as to lay a solid foundation for improving English listening. Anything is a process from quantitative change to qualitative change, only by reasonable arrangements for listening training and long practice will the final results be better.

References:

[1]Liu Longgen, Hu Kaibao，The factors on Affecting English Listening Comprehension，Foreign Language Teaching and Research in May, 2008.

[2]Yue Wenying，The Factors and Strategies to Affect Secondary English Listening[J].The classroom of Air English, 2010，3.

[3]Tao Yukang, Research on Mother Tongue, Cognition of the Understanding of Foreign Language Reading and Its Facilitating Mechanisms[J]. Foreign Language and their Teaching, 2008, 5.

[4]Wang Yinfang, English Pronunciation’s Impact on English Listening[J]. China Water Transport, 2008，1.