初中英语听力教学障碍及解决方法

3. What are the factors influencing the listening comprehension in Chinese middle school classrooms?
Listening is an important mean of language learning. It is one of the significant ways in English language communication. But so many students regard listening comprehension as the most difficult one among all kinds of examinations. Where are their barriers? How to train some tactics for them? That’s what I am going to talk about here.
3.1 The analysis of the reasons for students’ poor listening ability
3.1.1．About the teacher aspect
There is a shortage of English teachers in China. It is usually difficult for English teachers in China to go to English-speaking countries to study or work. Most of them don’t have the experience of going abroad. They have learned their English only in China.  So we may say they have certain shortage.
3.1.2．The English environment
The English environment in China is different from other countries e.g. Canada. In China, English is a foreign language (EFL), not a second language (ESL). Both students and teachers are doing their jobs under this condition which is quite different from that such as in the US. For example, Chinese immigrant students in Canada can learn English more quickly than those in China. Why? Because in Canada, English is regarded as their second language. They enjoy a much better English environment as well as have English high motivations. This is what is needed in China. What those students in China need is this authentic language environment which isn’t easy to be created in China.
3.1.3. The learning aspect
Listening comprehension is the summation of hearing and understanding. If you have a better level about English knowledge, you may be capable of understanding very well in listening to the materials, and may have an excellent response to any questions asked by the speakers on the tapes.
（ⅰ）Barriers on Phonetics and Phonology
It is clear that “Phonetics is defined as the study of the phonetic medium of language, and Phonology studies how speech sounds system in a language form pattern.” [2] (p22)  English, as a new language for Chinese students, usually appears some problems exactly on Phonetics and Phonology, such as the mistakes on pronunciation, intonation, and all kinds of skills like word stress, sentence stress, motion of sound, assimilation, sound---linking and incomplete explosion, etc. Therefore some basic knowledge about English Phonetics and Phonology will directly influence students’ listening comprehension. So designing activities must be aimed at point. So designing some interesting game is to let students discriminate the different pronunciation. The key point is guiding students to find the difference themselves. For example, most Chinese students find the discrimination of some sounds is a problem in listening comprehension, especially, some vowels. E.g., they can hardly distinguish the words like “sit—sea” and “bed--bad”. In a sentence like “He saw a thief steal into the palace”, steal /sti:l/ is very important in understanding the sentence, but some students just recognize it as still/stil/.