一项基于多媒体辅助英语听力学习的实证分析-an empirical analysis of multimedia - assisted english listening learning.docxVIP

Chapter OneIntroductionResearch BackgroundListening is a key second language skill, and it plays a significant role in communication and in language learning (Rubin, 1994; Dunkel, 1991; Rost, 1990; Anderson and Lynch, 1988), and is perhaps “the most fundamental language skill” (Oxford, 1993), so its development is of prime concern to language teachers. The Ministry of Education of China has paid great attention to the teaching of listening.However, in spite of its important role in people’s communicative activities，theteaching of English listening remains a somewhat poorly taught aspect of English in Chinese colleges．There are some reasons why the listening teaching efficiency is relatively low．Firstly, many listening materials used are not suitable for the listening teaching indeed．The material does not come from the authentic and natural language in real life．Either it is the written language that has been read out loud and recorded,or it is a clearly scripted simulation of spoken English, which sounds “stilted and artificial”(Mendelsohn,l994) ． Secondly, teachers just provide a lot of listeningpractice instead of instructing their students “how to” go about it in the classroom. To assure good performance for the students in the test, the listening class is usually becoming something like a pure test．The common mode is that tapes are played,comprehension exercises are completed by the learner, and teachers pay great attention to teaching and checking answers of the listening materials，neglecting what students need，how they feel and more importantly what they really achieve by such a class ． This traditional teaching mode lacks guidance to students on listening strategies．What teachers focus on are the outcomes of listening, rather than listening itself, product rather than process，since success is usually measured by correct responses to questions and answers．John Field(1999) argues that such conventionallistening lessons do little or nothing to improve the