Abstract
This paper reports a quasi-experimental study that was carried out in listening classes to address the following questions: What control do students expect in the listening classroom? What are the effects of the “zero class hour” way of teaching listening when more control is given to the students? The study was conducted at Huaiyin Normal University, where two non-English major classes taught by one teacher were selected. A questionnaire survey was conducted to get students’ opinion about the traditional way of teaching listening and what control they wanted to have. The results of the pretest and posttest were analyzed with SPSS. Both the experiment group and the control group made similar progress in the test of their listening comprehension, which indicates that the new way of teaching listening is as effective as the traditional one. From the amount of time that the experimental-group students spent on improving their listening comprehension, we can see that they made more efforts and became more active and more autonomous than before. The findings may give some support for the web-based distance education.
Highlights
General trends in education have been moving away from the teacher-directed regime towards a self-directed regime
According to the results of one questionnaire survey conducted by the researcher in two classes at Huaiyin Normal University, about 71% of students thought that they should be given more control of their own study
Benson (1997:25) identifies three versions: 1) the act of learning on one’s own and technical ability to do so, deriving from Positivist theories which view teaching as the means to equip learners for autonomy to manage learning outside the classroom or exercise independence within it; 2) the internal psychological capacity to self-direct one’s own learning, deriving from Constructivist theories which support self-directed and self-access learning as a means of promoting learner autonomy; 3) the control over the content and process of one’s own learning, deriving from Critical theory which emphasizes issues of power and control and the growth of autonomy as learners become more aware of the social context of their learning and the constraints it implies
Summary
General trends in education have been moving away from the teacher-directed regime towards a self-directed regime. In the traditional listening class, the teaching is usually carried out in the language lab or in a classroom. The teacher will give some explanation and play the tape again Under this kind of teaching: 1) Students usually have little control of the learning process; 2) Students just passively do what teachers tell them; 3) Students don’t have sufficient listening input; 4) Students’ anxiety is very high in answering questions; 5) Students’ efficiency of using learning time is low. Shanghai Foreign Language University and Sichuan University are teaching listening in the form of “zero-class hour” model. The former doesn’t limit the learning hours and students only take the exams at the end of the semester. The study will shed light on the matter of learner control and give some implications to the current language teaching
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