Applicationoflisteningstrategiestolisteningteachinginmiddleschool.doc

Application of listening strategies to listening teaching in middle school 1. Introduction Among the four basic language skills, listening has long been said to be a passive or receptive skill, which does not need too much effort. However, Vandergrift, a Canadian scholar, says that “listening isn’t a passive activity to the full extent but a quite complex active process.” (Vandergrift, 1999:44) In this process, learners have to tell from speech sounds, apprehend connotations of stresses and tones, comprehend vocabulary and grammar and so on. John Morley defines listening as “everything that impinges on the human processing which medicates between sound and the construction.” (John Morley,1991:88) Many arguments made by scholars have confirmed that listening is an active process rather than a straightforward process of sound to meaning as it is assumed by most people(Michael Rost,1992:34; Anderson＆Lynch,1988:37; Brown,1990:10) It is not until recently that teachers in middle school have gradually realized the importance of listening teaching. For quite a long time, in teaching listening, many English teachers only play tapes, giving no clues to the students. In most cases, they expose listening materials to the students, and then conduct tests to examine how much the students have understood in terms of a lot of comprehension exercises (usually in the form of multiple choice) instead of teaching students how to listen and how to deal with their listening problems, let alone imparting listening strategies to them to develop their listening ability. As a result, listening class is only used as a means of testing students’ listening comprehension rather than a means of enabling them to master listening skills. The students have not been given enough opportunities to practice listening or listening strategies. In order to help students improve their listening, a growing number of educators are doing researches in this field. They have found that listening strategies play