What measures can TCSL teachers take to reduce listening difficulty?

What the poster asked is actually how teachers of Chinese as a foreign language can teach listening classes well:

1. Choose some warm-up exercises appropriately to help students eliminate anxiety and build confidence.

The essence of listening comprehension is the process by which people use their auditory organs to receive and decode speech signals. In the real communication process, speech signals are presented in rapid succession and are fleeting. Listening comprehension is closely related to the speed of acceptance and decoding. In listening class, if a student fails to hear a word or phrase clearly and stops to think, he will miss the following content, which will affect his understanding of the entire listening chapter. Relevant research shows that hindrance anxiety is negatively correlated with students' listening level. Therefore, when we encounter materials with difficult content and many new words, it is necessary to create a relaxed and pleasant learning environment before listening to help students eliminate anxiety and build confidence.

2. Provide students with "comprehensible language input" to stimulate students' interest in learning and mobilize their enthusiasm for learning.

The vast majority of international students faced by teaching Chinese as a foreign language are adults and have great autonomy in learning. Listening classes are relatively boring and it is difficult for students to concentrate. Therefore, the input provided by teachers must be what they think they need and are interested in, in order to achieve good results.

Natural Method considers itself designed to help beginners become mediators, advocates that listening activities are crucial to language acquisition, and believes that humans can only acquire language through the understanding of information. It emphasizes "comprehensible input", which is what distinguishes the natural method from other understanding-based language teaching methods. The natural approach holds that language acquisition occurs as long as the learner hears meaningful language information and manages to understand it. In this regard, natural law proposed the famous "input hypothesis". The hypothesis is that in order to acquire the next stage of language, learners should understand the language knowledge containing the structure of the next stage, which is the "i+1" level (input slightly beyond the learner's current level).

1. In listening classes, try to avoid meaningless input.

In elementary-level teaching, students need as much exposure and familiarity with the target language as possible, so the author’s teaching focus is on sentences and paragraphs, especially the practice of listening skills in a certain context. . The listening textbooks I use basically do not include single sentences such as "next year is 2006" or "he is Chinese". They appear in the form of dialogues and essays from the beginning. The author believes that with the supporting teaching materials, the difficulty of listening classes can be appropriately higher. Inputting exercises in conversation classes or reading and writing classes in advance conforms to the "i+1" input hypothesis of the natural method.

2. Try "i+1" level input.

(1) The speaking speed of lectures should be normal and should not be deliberately slowed down.

Although it is an elementary level, the speaking speed faced by international students in real life is generally faster than that in the textbook. We teachers of Chinese as a foreign language often hear students complain about why they can basically understand what the teacher says in class, but become "deaf" as soon as they leave school. For students at the elementary level (those who are starting from scratch are not included), should teachers of Chinese as a foreign language specifically accommodate some students in their speaking speed in class? The author's speaking speed in the listening class is slightly faster than that of teachers in parallel classes, trying to minimize the difference between the small language environment of the classroom and the large language environment of the outside world. At the beginning, some students generally reported that they did not understand. However, after more than a week, everyone can basically adapt.

(2) Let students preview the new words themselves and explain them briefly in class.

Since the teaching materials used are matched with the comprehensive courses, most of the new words have already appeared in reading, writing and conversation, and the teacher can write the pinyin on the blackboard as a reminder. For some difficult grammar points and new words, the author only briefly explains them without making too many expansions, so as to mobilize their enthusiasm and thinking to solve them.

(3)Supplement appropriate materials.

If the teacher just follows the textbook teaching in the listening class, then the students can go home and listen by themselves. If teachers can find some other relevant listening materials based on the textbook content and let students practice, this will not only improve their listening ability but also mobilize their enthusiasm. The textbook I am currently using is "Chinese Listening Course". In addition, I have also found several related listening materials as supplements. In each class, I will add one or two materials that are close to students' lives as supplementary content. After class, students expressed that they liked the new content very much.

3. Pay attention to students’ emotional factors and create a relaxed and pleasant classroom atmosphere.

The "emotional filter hypothesis" was also proposed by natural law. Krashen believes that emotional factors are closely related to foreign language acquisition. There is a blocking of verbal information in the human mind that Krashen calls "emotional filtering." Generally speaking, students with high self-confidence and motivation will perform better in learning, and the same is true for learning Chinese as a foreign language. So in listening classes, in order to improve students' learning efficiency, what teachers have to do is to create a relaxed and pleasant classroom and reduce students' psychological tension and fear.

We should pay great attention to the relationship with students in teaching. It is best to come to the classroom ten minutes early for each class to communicate with students at close range. We should not give up the opportunity to communicate with students after class. , and strive to establish a friendly and harmonious relationship with them.

When classroom teaching officially begins, you can tell students a short story, humorous and humorous is best. In this way, students quickly entered a state of excitement.

In classroom teaching, we naturally should not just listen to the material rigidly. How can we turn a seemingly boring listening material into a "bread" that students love to eat? I think we can try the following : After listening to the material once or twice, try to find some interesting target points, set the topic, and allow students to talk freely. At this time, the teacher should guide the students to reach the climax of the classroom atmosphere, so This also requires teachers to be as humorous and relaxed as possible in their classroom language, so that they can control the enthusiasm of the entire class at any time.

The author once read a short article to students called "Brain Drain". After completing this exercise, let the students talk about their own opinions and the situation in their own country. Since the topic is very close to their own lives, and the students come from all over the world, everyone is particularly excited and active, and they are often from the student’s country. I went to that student’s country, and the people from that student’s country went to another student’s country. When I asked a Mexican student, she said: “Many people in our country like to immigrate to the United States.” I thought at that time She smiled and said, "You go there by bicycle, right?" She smiled knowingly: "Mostly you go swimming!" As soon as she finished her words, everyone laughed.

A listening class for Chinese as a foreign language should maintain a rhythm that is both tense and relaxed. Students must have certain intervals and relaxation time after a period of relatively high concentration. Only when students are properly relaxed can they better carry out the next stage of learning. Some teachers always play recordings to students in listening classes, making students tense up all the time to do exercises. Students can easily enter the fatigue stage, causing the class to become extremely boring. In order to liven up the atmosphere, some teachers spend most of the classroom teaching away from textbooks and materials, and students end up gaining nothing. This is also undesirable.

4. Use a variety of practice methods to enhance students’ enthusiasm and activity in class.

In the teaching of listening classes, the communicative teaching method should be fully and thoroughly implemented, changing the previous injection and cramming teaching methods, with students as the main body and teachers as the leader.

Of course, the listening class trains students’ ability to “listen”. Listening is an input activity in communication activities, and input is for output. In order to increase students' initiative and activity in class, a variety of practice methods should be used, such as the combination of listening and speaking, listening and writing, and listening and doing, so that students can become the main participants in teaching. But we must be clear that speaking, reading, and writing are only auxiliary means in listening teaching. These auxiliary means can effectively activate the classroom atmosphere, stimulate learning interest, and master listening skills. For example, listening and watching at the same time, reading text materials or visual images, such as pictures, projections, multimedia, etc. Imagination or the combination of text and speech can help students better connect phonetic forms and semantics, thereby helping them remember and consolidate semantics.

Some teachers may say that this is too troublesome. You have to find visual images for a listening class, not to mention that many classrooms do not have multimedia. In fact, sometimes you can make full use of your own conditions. When you stand on the podium, you are a living visual image.

The author once listened to a piece of material for students. The content was very humorous. It probably said that Xiao Wang met Lao Li on the street. He saw Lao Li taking out a cigarette and thought it was for him, so he He reached out to pick it up, but Lao Li started to smoke on his own halfway. Xiao Wang was very embarrassed and suddenly said, "The leeks in the market today are so cheap, only 2 cents per catty!" After I played it to the students again, Unexpectedly, they had no reaction. Later, I simply acted out the words and deeds of the two according to the materials. Now the students suddenly understood and laughed out of control, and the classroom atmosphere reached a climax.

In fact, the combination of speaking, writing and listening is also very effective, such as retelling after listening, answering questions, dictation, and listening and memorizing. When these exercises are performed at the same time as listening training, you can Improve the listener's attention, promote memory and understanding of the information heard, thereby improving listening efficiency. It should be noted here that "speaking" in the article is different from speaking in oral classes. It is not mainly for expression, but to help memory, check the quality and effect of listening, and avoid monotonous stimulation. Therefore, as long as the main meaning is stated, there is no need to dwell on inaccurate wording, inaccurate intonation, grammatical problems, etc. The "writing" here is also different from that in writing classes. Students can write Chinese characters, Pinyin, and their mother tongue. The important thing is to be able to show that they understand the corpus.

Let’s take a look at such a listening question (from the second volume of "Chinese Listening Course"):

Female: You listen to this tape every time I come here. If it were me, I would Enough.

Male: This is my favorite set, and it’s not enough to listen to it a hundred times.

Question: What does she mean?

Many students don’t understand what it means after listening to it. The main reason is that they don’t understand the meaning of the language point “V+ is enough”.

How do we deal with this key language point? My method is to first let students repeat the sentences in the conversation, and then set a natural context to help students understand. I asked the students: "Do you like to eat in the cafeteria?" Some students replied: "No." I then asked: "Why?" The students replied: "It's not delicious. I eat in the cafeteria every day." I said: "Teacher Same thing, I don’t like to eat in the cafeteria, I’ve had enough!” Then I asked the student: “He watched a movie five times, what happened to him?” The student naturally said: “He has seen enough!” /p>

There are some questions in our listening materials that require students to make judgments about right and wrong. Some teachers just ask students to get the answers right. In fact, this approach is inappropriate, because some students may get the answers right by guessing, but in fact they do not understand a certain point in the material. Therefore, we should ask students more during this process why it is wrong, why it is correct, and what the material says, so that students can retell it according to the original text or in their own words. This can not only objectively understand the students' situation, but also allow students to deepen their impression of the language points.

5. Conclusion

The above are some rough opinions of the author. Listening teaching is a complex subject, and it is impossible to simply rely on a certain teaching method to solve the problem. . At present, listening teaching for teaching Chinese as a foreign language has made great progress, but it is undeniable that there are still many problems. As teachers of Chinese as a foreign language, we need to constantly absorb various appropriate theories based on the actual situation, seek improvement methods suitable for ourselves, give full play to the advantages of the language environment, constantly improve the overall quality, and promote the improvement of listening class teaching.