论文总字数：38906字

摘 要

听力对英语学习者而言是四项基本技能之一，而且听力教学对教师来说也是一项颇具挑战性的任务。目前人们完全认可的两种听力教学策略主要是自上而下与自下而上，一些学者也主张这两种策略同时使用。但是，许多教师忽视了学生能力水平这一因素，而且甚至仍然采用传统模式,从而并没有获得令人满意的听力教学效果而且甚至偏离了教学目的。这篇论文指出了目前淮安初中英语听力教学中存在的种种问题，讨论这两种主要听力教学策略以及如何根据初中生的不同能力水平来达到这两种策略的合理运用。

关键词：自下而上；自上而下；学生水平；听力教学

Contents

1. Introduction 1

2. Literature Review 2

2.1 Previous studies 2

2.2 Theoretical basis 2

2.3 The definition of bottom-up and top-down processing 3

3. Problems of Huai’an Junior High School English Listening Teaching 4

4. Case Study of the Two Processing Strategies 5

4.1 Application of bottom-up processing 6

4.2 Application of top-down processing 8

4.3 Combined application of top-down and bottom-up processing 10

4.4 Comparisons between traditional listening teaching and the two processing strategies 12

4.5 Summary 13

5. Conclusion 14

Works Cited 16

Appendix 17

1. Introduction

Listening is one of the most important pathways of language input. Compared with other skills，listening skill was often overlooked by foreign language learners because of its abstraction and difficulty. There was a time when listening was thought to be taken for granted and can be formed automatically without voluntary attention because it was seen as a passive activity. For instance, listening was presumed as a reflex and something like breathing process (Morley 24)

But with the increasing international exchanges, people’s demand for foreign languages especially English has been sharply highlighted and English communicative competence also began to exert a deep impact on people’s life. Meanwhile, people are also fully aware that listening, as a matter of fact, should be a process with a particular purpose rather than a passive one in language learning. Listening, as same as reading, is a receptive skill while speaking and writing are productive processes. Reception is the guarantee of achieving high-efficiency production. In other word, learners are required to cultivate the listening input ability, which plays a vital function in language acquisition. To seek the appropriate ways for teachers to improve students’ listening comprehension, there also has been a growing tendency to have some different research studies into the methods of listening teaching. According to Buck, bottom-up processing view and the top-down processing view are involved in the listening process system which contains linguistic knowledge and non-linguistic knowledge. The point that bottom-up processing and top-down processing strategies are fatal to listening comprehension is out of question. So, teachers should go all out to lead students to these two ways of processing information, which was pointed out by Marc Helgesen in the book Practical English Language Teaching (Nunan 115). At the same time, some potential factors ought to be taken into consideration, especially learners’ level, an aspect that is often neglected. Therefore, this thesis elaborates the two processing strategies, points out some problems of Huai’an junior high school listening teaching and analyzes proper application of bottom-up and top-down processing strategies according to student’s level, combining with listening teaching cases in a Huai’an junior high school, and finally draws a conclusion that bottom-up-based strategy is well suited to lower-level students while higher-level students remain flexibility in the use of the two processing strategies, not restricted to one of them.

2. Literature Review

2.1 Previous studies

With more importance attached to listening teaching, some scholars have been committed to studies and proposed some valuable views on the application of the two strategies. What is in a wide acknowledgment and accept is that the use of combination of bottom-up and top-down approaches is a wise choice. Take Nunan for instance, he stressed that teachers should adopt both of them in listening classrooms to develop students’ listening skills in his article in 1998. Similar to Nunan, Peterson advocated that teachers ought to promote flexibility in the two strategies (Peterson 89), which would be of great help for students to improve their listening efficiently. Cai Jie also concluded that the interaction of bottom-up and top-down processing strategies can influence students’ listening comprehension ability a lot (Cai Jie 25). However, many scholars, as well as many teachers overemphasize the interaction view of the two approaches, ignoring some other potential factors, especially listeners’ level, which can determine classroom instructing efficiency. Thus, taking a Huai’an junior high school English listening teaching as an example, this paper is intended to focus on discussion on application of bottom-up processing and top-down processing to listening teaching from the perspective of students’ level. To some degree, the thesis can make some contributions to listening teaching. Students will be inclined to cope with the difficult points they encounter in listening comprehension from the their own level and are likely to enhance their confidence in learning English knowledge. Teachers, on the other hand, can easily provide different kinds of strategy training activities for students with top-down processing and bottom-up processing based on the analysis of the level of listeners, which can bring about a striking effect on listening teaching in Huai’an junior high school listening teaching.

2.2 Theoretical basis

As mentioned above, the writer attempts to talk over the application of bottom-up and top-down processing strategies on the students’ level perspective. So, the concept of teaching students according to their aptitude must be referred to in this part. Every barber knows that students’ variable features and different proficiency level in learning English listening are related to a lot of objective and subjective elements, such as otherness of intelligence, difference of starting points, diversification of cultural background, and the like. Some researches probing into listening comprehension manifest that students with different proficiency level in their learning put their concern on variable approaches to processing information. For example, McDonugh in 1995 made a summary that students with higher level tend to employ top-down processing, while the lower-level students prefer the bottom-up processing (McDonugh 151). Field’s research experiment in 2004 also showed that lower-level listeners would turn to bottom-up processing approach for decoding information instead of resorting to top-down processing strategy (Field 375). For the sake of effectiveness of listening lessons, teachers ought to pay enough attention to listeners’ level and take the principle of “teaching students in accordance with their aptitude” as the instruction point to induct students to express themselves with the appropriate processing strategies in listening teaching class.

2.3 The definition of bottom-up and top-down Processing

Different definitions of the two types of processing models has been entailed since they were proposed by Richards to explain the ways of listening comprehension. Field and Carrier held the idea that bottom-up information originates from the written or aural input. Listeners who are engaged in bottom-up processing will fix their attention on the listening material itself, and then extract the meaning of the content by decoding some segmented parts, including sounds, words, phrases and sentences, into complete informative texts in a linear way. In contrast to bottom-up processing, top-down processing keeps a non-linear perspective and top-down information stems from a extended context or the learners’ background knowledge about the world. With top-down processing, learners are likely to mobilize their background knowledge in their brains, either content schema or textual schema (Long 35) to have a prediction and judgment in advance, which contributes to their inferring the meaning that speakers want to express.

If the above definitions make you fall into a predicament of comprehending these two processing strategies, we can take a famous and simple metaphor to better understand them. Imagining a brick wall, you can easily take notice of the details as you stand at the bottom of it. Similarly, some learners who stress the parts of English, try to process information from the bottom up. However, if you stand on the top of the wall, you will miss some details, but what catches your attention is an expanse of scenery. Likewise, top-down processing, which has a close connection with the schema theory, starts with listeners’ prior information and life knowledge inside their head, So that if we depict bottom-up processing as to be at the bottom of something or somewhere and try to understand the place where we are by concentrating on all the concrete features, then top-down processing can be regarded as metaphorically to look down on something from the top and then try to get an overview of the whole thing (Zhang Yin 45).

3. Problems of Huai’an Junior High School English Listening Teaching

Nowadays, under the impetus of quality education and new curriculum standard, Listening has become one of the key standards to judge students’ English comprehensive ability and it is also in increasing prominence in English learning. Unluckily, There still remain some problems in Huai’an junior high school listening teaching.

Some traditional listening teaching modes haven’t thoroughly stepped down from the historical stage and even are dominant in some regions and junior high schools of Huai’an. In traditional teaching modes, teacher-centered and spoon-feeding teaching is widely employed. “Play recorders-Students’ listening and checking- Play recorders again” is a set system under which interaction between students and teachers is severely lacked and students are only thought as passive receivers. It is one of the reasons why some junior high schools cultivate so many students who are too shamed to face their dumb English and keep silent in English classrooms. What is more worse is that without solving any difficult problems, teachers just directly announce the listening answers to students when commenting on a test paper, just in order to safe time for other text types. Sometimes, not taking students’ different proficiency in listening into account, teachers are likely to ask students whatever level they are in to give answers to some questions though teachers consciously encourage students to take the bottom-up and top -down processing strategies.

A couple of causes are responsible for these problems. To begin with, quality-oriented education hasn’t been really come into practice owing to the strong traditional exam-oriented education, which heavily hinders the renewal of educational concepts and modes in our country. Secondly, some schools and teachers just show concern about students’ grades, turning a blind eye to students’ different levels. From the view point of many teachers, pursuing high scores is the recipe for achieving success. Nevertheless, it is not constructive to promote students’ development in an all-around way. Not only does it cause students’ loss of interest in learning listening, but also obeys the idea of the new curriculum standard. Chances are that students will have high scores but poor ability with the long-term use of these unreasonable listening teaching modes. Thirdly, students seem not to be immersed in the English language environment. Teachers often extensively speak mother tongue to teach English listening, leading to students’ lack of linguistic knowledge and related cultural background knowledge. What’s more, a lot of teachers can not render students listening skills on account of their own limited ability. So, students are accustomed to translating the content they hear into Chinese gradually. In this way, they will miss the next information. As a result, these existing problems will cause to a vicious cycle.

4. Case Study of the Two Processing Strategies

Based on the above analysis, I think that it is urgent for us to attach much attention to the situation of Huai’an junior high school English listening teaching. Teachers also should abandon the traditional listening teaching and adopting effectual strategies. Reasonable usage of bottom-up strategy and top-down strategy from the perspective of students’ level is one of the sound educational strategies.

In order to better understand the use of the two strategies in Huai’an junior high schools, the author has done some case studies in the past few months with the help of her friends. These cases were taken from a junior high school called KaiMing Middle School who has a history of about 5 years in Huai’an Economic Development Area. Participants in these studies are all students who are in Class Two, Grade Seven. This class is an ordinary one consisting of 43 students. These 43 subjects can be classified into two groups, higher-level group and lower-level group according to their scores gained in an important English test (see Appendix1) which aimed to investigate students’ proficiency in English listening after their having studied English for several months since they came into this middle school. The students who gained above 80 scores were placed in the higher-level group and the left students were in the lower-level group (see Table 1).

Table 1

H=higher-level L=Lower-level S=scores N=students number

In each study, these different levels of students were given the listening texts selected from the English textbook. The reason for choosing the texts is that they are in line with the new curriculum objectives and cover different styles of topics and appeal to junior high students, so they are suitable for class teaching in Huai’an area. Before having listening class, the teacher reconstructed the texts and designed different training activities carefully. Three stages including pre-listening, while-listening, and post-listening were involved in the whole listening class. A recorder, blackboard and CAI were also needed.

4.1 Application of bottom-up processing

4.1.1 Case study 1

In this study, the teacher chose a dialogue about weather in different places between Annie and Simon(see Appendix 2).

Bottom-up strategy was applied in this class. The teacher, before students’ listening, showed some pictures about different weather conditions on the PPT and explained the new words and phrases at length such as temperature, degree, snowstorm, a high of ,a low of, stay above and so on, just a little of background knowledge was referred to when necessary. While listening, the teacher stopped playing recorders at some time to deal with stress accents, pauses, some difficult sentence structures, and the pronunciation of the weather degree for students and encouraged them to note these points down so as to complete the next test in the step of post-listening.

After the first listening, some activities that mainly related to bottom-up processing were set up by the teacher. On the one hand, the teacher clarified the similar kind of information and some answers were directly given in a chart, but other missing information was for students to fill in.

On the other hand, after the chart was completed, the teacher played the tape again and encouraged students to read the dialogue after the record. The reason for the activity is that one of the purposes of bottom-up processing in listening is to imitate pronunciation and intonation, build up language sense, and finally obtain information. Then, the teacher selected several students at random to enact the dialogue by imitating the native and idiomatic pronunciation.

At the end of the class, the teacher played the record twice again and then chose another form of training in which students needed to fill in the missing words and phrases in a short passage to consolidate the listening material. The total score in this short passage was 20 and each blank was 2 scores.

4.1.2 Result analysis

In the process of this class, the teacher observed all the students’ performance and took down their scores, mean scores and accuracy after they finished the blanks in the short passage(see Appendix 3). The result is as follows(see Table 2)

Table 2

H=higher-level L=lower-level MS=mean score N=student number

By and large, then, according to the data illustrated in table 2 and teacher’s careful observation, the two groups both filled in the blanks very well with the training of bottom-up strategy. Some students got all the answers and just a few of them missed two blanks due to their carelessness and incorrect spelling. Their mean scores respectively were 18.4762 and 17.6364. Students with higher level finished the tasks smoothly and their accuracy reached about 92%, in that they have many advantages in language level and can cope with detailed language points in a short time. Despite the fact that some lower-level students didn’t do as well as the other group, they still made a impressive progress and their accuracy in the answers also reached almost 88%. When the teacher added some linguistic knowledge to the listening material, they listened carefully and were active in completing the tasks. Their participation was also high because they had got over some difficult linguistic knowledge with the teacher’s help and can finally got across the whole meaning of this dialogue in the process of bottom-up strategy training. So, the bottom-up processing strategy is proper to both groups.

4.2 Application of top-down processing

4.2.1 Case study 2

In this study, the material that was applied in the first case study continued to be used in this class. What was the difference was that the teacher focused on adopting top-down strategy.

The teacher in this class invited students to enjoy a documentary about weather in different seasons in different places before listening to the tape. The purpose of this step was to provide some related background knowledge for students instead of giving a clear and detailed explanation of linguistic knowledge, which made students feel that they seemed to be placed in an authentic language environment and sparked their interest in the coming listening topic.

When hearing the sentence ‘That’s not true everywhere’, the teacher ceased playing the record and asked the students to answer the following question:

Q: Can you predict what kind of content the two speakers will talk about?

After a second, a student belonging to the higher-level group gave the answer to the question quickly and correctly, but students in lower-level group had a slow response to it.

Then, the teacher continued to play the next message of the dialogue between Annie and Simon. When the tape was over, students were requested to check whether their prediction in Q1 is true or not and guided to infer some useful information, including places, time, and topics from the listening contents according to their background knowledge and prior experience.

At the step of post-listening, the teacher pointed out the fact that we now sometimes experience villainous weather conditions and gave them several minutes to discuss in groups how to improve our environment.

4.2.2 Result analysis

Although the teacher didn’t set up a series of tests for students, she still kept careful observation on reactions to the questions and recorded their participation in class (see Table3).

剩余内容已隐藏，请支付后下载全文，论文总字数：38906字