Place of Listening Instruction in College English Courses in China
That ese EFL learners' listening ability is weak in parison to other skills such as reading and writing is, to soed to the fact that in China the instructional emphasis is unbalanced so the students are not able to develop all the language skills equally. In the past, Chinese students were traditionally taught to read and write in English so that they could understand English materials in the fields of their future careers. From the perspective of the students, listening was viewed as a passive process of merely listening to a text and then finishing the after-listening questions. From the perspective of the teachers, the approach adopted focused more on the product of listening than the process. It was assumed that listening skills would develop automatically if other skills were improved to a desirable level and therefore classroo on listening was unnecessary. As a result, listening activities remained virtually a test of prehension, and listening cots often felt they had achieved the least. “Such attributions indicate a sense of passivity and helplessness in language learners which could easily result in their becoo being less effective listeners” (Grahaumstances, offering language learners more listening activities would most likely only add to their sense of failure.
Only in the last decade has listening begun to be acknowledged in its own right in EFL education in China. The Course of College English in Chinese universities underwent a nation-wide reform in 2007 with the publication of the Chinese Education Ministry's College English Curriculum Require that “the objective of College English is to develop students' ability to use English in an all-round way, especially in listening and speaking, so that in their future studies and careers as well as social interactions they will be able to municate effectively” (). The requirements for undergraduate College English teaching are set at three levels—the basic level, the intermediate level and the advanced level, and the requirements for listening of the three levels are shown in Table 1.
Table 1 The Requirements for Listening at the Three Levels
(Source: College English Curriculum Requirements, -22)
Though the role of listening is now recognized as iy EFL teaching, listening instruction, with only an average teaching tiere to help students develop the coo prehend languageinspoken form. Thereis, todate, still a gapbetweenthe requireeaching of listening in China. Ag of listening in Chinese universities, the two t are:
(a) To a, teaching listening is still confined to first playing a recording of a listening text, then checking the students' answers, and finally infort answers. Such instructional methods as repetition, schema-raising, and strategy training are seldom employed and probably never heard of by sostruction in the use of listening strategies only began in the last decade and strategies for developing itive awareness have been largely neglected. The effects of ening strategy training on Chinese EFL learners' listening prehension have been little studied and little is known about the relationship between the learners' ening awareness and their listening prehension.
(b) As a of listening input, vocabulary is of prio Chinese EFL learners' listening coal vocabulary acquisition through listening is a promising source of new vocabulary for Chinese university EFL learners. Nevertheless, incidental acquisition of vocabulary through listening by Chinese learners has hardly been researched in China, neither has the relationship between Chinese learners' EFL vocabulary acquisition andtheir itive awareness.