Chapter One Introduction
1.1Background of the Study
Second language acquisition has become more and more significant in theeducational field. With the impact of globalization on society, politics, culture andeconomy, people are paying more attention to the second language acquisition.Foreign language has shifted its role from obtaining the necessary academicknowledge to functioning as a necessary communicating tool in social life and work.In order to fulfill the social and communicative task of a foreign language, thetraining of the competence on speaking and listening of the second language hasgained much attention recently. Listening teaching is becoming an important task inforeign language teaching. Except for instructing the students to gain good scores inthe listening tests of CET-4 and CET-6, the college listening teaching is also requiredto improve the students’ ability of communication with others in social life. Manycollege students tend to seek jobs in multinational corporations or overseas, andsome students plan to pursue a further study abroad. So how to improve the effect oflistening teaching and help the students to achieve improvement on listeningcompetence has become more imperative than before.Listening comprehension is a mental process. It involves the abilities to receiveand decode the verbal message. The acquirement of these abilities is related to thereception of the knowledge input. By decoding the utterances and predicting the meaning, the listener can achieve the goal of communication. Through theexplanation of the nature of listening comprehension, it can be found that theknowledge input is extremely vital in listening comprehension. Various studies onlistening teaching have been explored from the perspective of optimizing theknowledge input to the students, so as to improve the effect of listening teaching,which will be elaborated in the next chapter.
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1.2Significance of the Study
The previous studies on listening teaching mainly focus on optimizing theknowledge input to the learners by teaching them linguistic knowledge or buildingtheir conceptual system of background knowledge. Under the guidance of thesestudies, great achievements are made in improving the effect of listening teaching. The learners’ listening competence is effectively improved with the input of thelinguistic knowledge and the background knowledge. Therefore, preparing thelearners with sufficient and optimal knowledge input is extremely vital in thelistening teaching process.The current studies on listening teaching are mostly from the perspective ofoptimizing the knowledge input. However, there are other factors in the listeningclass which may also be useful in influencing the effect of listening teaching, such asthe students’ inpidual differences, the seat arrangement, class activities, trainingintensity, teaching instruments, listening materials and so on. These influentialfactors are rarely taken into the consideration in the listening teaching. In this thesis,the author tries to make an empirical study on the listening teaching from anecological teaching perspective. Besides stressing on optimizing the knowledgeinput to students, the author also attempts to combine other influential factors withteaching activities in listening class. By applying the ecological teaching theory andprinciples to the listening teaching, the author takes the listening class as anecological entity, and aims to find out the relationships between the influentialfactors and the effect of listening teaching, so as to improve the learners’ listeningcompetence.
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Chapter Two Literature Review
2.1 Basic Conception of Listening Comprehension
Listening is one of the four skills in learning a language. Many students feelthat listening comprehension is very difficult to improve. To know the nature and theprocess of listening comprehension might be helpful to the improvement. It is difficult to give listening comprehension a clear definition for it is a mentalprocess. Narrowly speaking, it means that listeners are able to understand whatspeakers have said, or they can clearly get the intentions which are delivered byspeakers (Hedge, 2002). Generally speaking, listening comprehension includes notonly the ability to capture the meaning of speakers’ utterances, but also the ability tomentally process these utterances and then give reactions. Listening comprehensioninvolves the abilities to receive the verbal message, thendecode these sentences,predicting the meaning, and finally achieve the goal of communication. However,when referring to listening teaching, there is always some mistaken understandingthat it is a one-way passive activity which only fulfills the process from speakers tolisteners, but not the other way around. Actually, listening comprehension is atwo-way process. It refers to not only the activity speakers convey to listeners, butalso the activity of listeners’ responses which involve the knowledge from both thelinguistic and the non-linguistic aspects.
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2.2 Previous Studies on Listening Teaching
Plenty of scholars have explored topics on listening teaching. In the light ofthose outstanding studies, great achievements have been made on improving theeffect of listening teaching. In this section, the major studies on listening teachingwill be discussed. The studies on second language teaching begin centuries ago. The first secondlanguage teaching approach is Grammar-Translation Approach. It is characterized byusing the learner’s mother tongue in the teaching process, emphasizing on the studyof translation and grammar (Ellis, 2000). The acquisition of listening competence isless important at that time. With the increasing demand for communication in foreignlanguages, Direct Approach begins to take the place of Grammar-TranslationApproach in second language teaching. It is believed that the second languageshould be learned by repeated listening, so as to pronounce accurately (Ellis, 2000).Listening begins to play a key role in language teaching. In 1940s, AudiolingualApproach becomes popular in second language teaching. It concentrates oncultivating the learner’s competence of listening and speaking. More attention is paidto listening teaching since then.
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Chapter Three Theoretical Framework.....17
3.1 Definition of Ecological Teaching.........17
3.2 Basic Ecological Teaching Principles....20
Chapter Four Research Methodology.......27
4.1 Research questions.........27
4.2 Subjects ........27
4.3 Instruments.........28
4.4 Research Procedures ......30
4.5 Data Collection ........32
Chapter Five Results and Discussion .......33
5.1 Data Analysis .....33
5.2 Analysis of the Application of the Ecological Teaching.....42
Chapter Five Results and Discussion
The detailed information about the experiment of the ecological listeningteaching has been presented in the last chapter. In this chapter, the collected data andthe application of the ecological teaching principles in the research will be analyzedand discussed in detail. Through the quantitative and the qualitative analysis, theauthor tries to explore the characteristics and the influential factors in the ecologicallistening teaching. The listening pre-test was given both in the experimental class (EC) and thecontrol class (CC) at the first class of the experimental semester. Eighty students ofthe two classes took part in the test, and the eighty answer sheets were all valid. Theindependent samples test was employed in the analysis of the pre-test results of thetwo classes. The analysis result is shown in Table 5.1. From Table 5.1, it can be seen that the total test score is 30. The mean score ofEC is 18.5 points, with the Std. deviation 4.5; and the mean score of CC is 19 points,with the Std. deviation 4.4. We can see from it that the mean score of CC is a littlehigher than EC’s, and the Std. deviations of the two classes have no obviousdifference. Through Independent Samples T-Test, P= 0.698> 0.05, it can be foundthat there is no significant difference in the students’ listening competence betweenCC and EC before the experiment.
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Conclusion
In this thesis, an empirical study on listening teaching is conducted with theapplication of ecological teaching principles. Besides emphasizing on optimizing theknowledge input to the students to improve their listening competence, the authoraims to study listening teaching from an ecological perspective. Though the analysisof the tests results and the interviewees, it can be found that the students in theexperimental class have made better improvement on their listening competence thanthe students in the control class through the ecological teaching. Therefore,ecological listening teaching is proved effective in improving learners’ listeningcompetence. Based on the results, the major findings on this empirical study,suggestions for listening teaching and the limitations of the study will be presentedin this chapter. The listening teaching experiment is designed based on the ecological teachingprinciples, including “The Law of Limiting Factors Law”, “The Law of Tolerance”,“Flowerpot Effect”, “Ecology Position Principle”, and “Allee’s Principle”. Theauthor tries to improve the students’ listening competence from an ecologicalteaching perspective. Based on the literature reviewed, theories and principleselaborated, and the data analyzed, the major findings of the research are thefollowing.
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References (omitted)