4
2.3 General Ways of Improving Listening Comprehension 4
2.3.1 Learning Strategies For Improving Listening Comprehension 4
2.3.2 Teaching Activities for Improving Listening Comprehension 4
2.4 A Specific Way of Improving Listening Comprehension ---- Shadowing Exercise 5
2.4.1 An Overview of Shadowing Exercise 5
2.4.2 Shadowing Exercise and Listening Comprehension 5
3. Methodology 7
3.1 Participants 7
3.2 Research Design 7
3.3 Instruments 7
3.4 Procedure 8
3.4.1 Group Assignment 8
3.4.2 Experiment 8
3.4.3 Interviews 8
4. Findings 9
5. Analysis 12
5.1 Effect of Shadowing Exercise on Listening Comprehension 12
5.2 Impact of Shadowing Exercise on Oral Speaking 12
5.3 Difficulties in Doing Shadowing Exercise 12
6. Conclusion and Recommendation 13
References 15
1. Introduction
Listening is the main form of language using in daily life. It’s the most important way for human beings to get information. However, comprehending spoken English is certainly not easy for Chinese students, in part because their first language dominates most of their communication. When taking a classroom English listening test regardless whether it being high stakes or not, learners are usually confronted with a difficulty that they sometimes cannot paraphrase the listening material completely though they can make the right choice in paper. The main reason to cause this phenomenon is that the capacity of the short-term memory is limited (李可, 2013).
Therefore, in order to improve junior high school students’ listening comprehension, an effective way of enlarging their short-term memory should be considered first. Based on a large quantity of research on the printed books and on the Internet, an exercise, or an activity which can be used in the post-listening task seems to be an effective way to improve students’ capacity of short-term memory, at the same time, enhancing their listening comprehension. This kind of exercise is called shadowing exercise. It is usually applied in the interpretation course in the college which trains college students’ ability of interpretation. While doing the shadowing exercise, students should pay attention to every word they hear and they cannot be distracted by anything, or they will get stuck and cannot catch up with the sound recording. It may be a little difficult for students in junior high school, because most of them cannot concentrate on one thing for a very long time. However, the shadowing exercise, more or less, can be a way to help students enlarge their capacity of short-term memory, which improves their listening comprehension as well.
In this study, the researcher will show how shadowing exercise was implemented in the junior high school classroom to improve students’ listening comprehension. Then, an experiment was conducted in two classes (One is called Class Three, and the other is called Class Four) in a Hangzhou middle school. The experiment was mainly about the shadowing exercise which was implemented as a post-listening activity. Class Three is Experimental Group(EG) in which the teacher implemented the shadowing exercise to train students’ listening comprehension,, and Class Four is Control Group (CG) in which the teacher asked students to look at the listening material while repeating after the recordings. Before the experiment, the students in the two groups have different levels of listening comprehension. The students in EG, on the whole, have better listening comprehension than those in CG. 关于影子练习法提高英语听力理解的研究(2):http://www.751com.cn/yingyu/lunwen_45518.html