Warm -Up in Listening Class

1405 Words6 Pages
Warm-up Exercises in Listening Classes Zhang Yi Jun Kunming University of Science and Technology (Kunming, Yunnan, China) Listening to English is more difficult for students who are not English majors. Many students have associated listening courses with pain and boredom and often complain that they benefit little from listening lessons. So, it is necessary for English teachers to realize the importance of how to make listening classes more interesting and to know how to motivate students so that they can make progress in listening comprehension. Introduction We can see clearly that the present situation of the teaching of listening in most colleges in China is not encouraging. The traditional way of teaching, such as, introducing some new difficult words, listening to the tape again and again and then giving correct answers, still prevails. It is not difficult for us to see how detrimental such a listening class is to learners. Such an approach to "teaching" listening is more like "testing" listening, because listeners are simply exposed to a succession of listening texts on a tape, and then are tested how much they have understood in terms of a lot of comprehension exercises rather than being taught how to listen and how to cope with their listening problems in the class. (Brown, 1990; Anderson & Lynch, 1988; Field, 1998). Many students complained that they became tired of listening to the tape from beginning to the end with some mechanical exercises. Without interest, motivation and variation in teaching and learning, students felt bored in listening classes. As a result, the passive attitude kept students from making much progress in listening comprehension. In this paper, what we want to discuss is how to make listening classes more interesting and how to develop students' listening ability. Just as Broughton says, "motivation is a basic principle
Open Document