LANGUAGE IN INDIA

Strength for Today and Bright Hope for Tomorrow

Volume 16:6 June 2016
ISSN 1930-2940

Managing Editor: M. S. Thirumalai, Ph.D.
Editors: B. Mallikarjun, Ph.D.
         Sam Mohanlal, Ph.D.
         B. A. Sharada, Ph.D.
         A. R. Fatihi, Ph.D.
         Lakhan Gusain, Ph.D.
         Jennifer Marie Bayer, Ph.D.
         G. Baskaran, Ph.D.
         L. Ramamoorthy, Ph.D.
         C. Subburaman, Ph.D. (Economics)
         N. Nadaraja Pillai, Ph.D.
         Renuga Devi, Ph.D.
         Soibam Rebika Devi, M.Sc., Ph.D.
Assistant Managing Editor: Swarna Thirumalai, M.A.

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Investigating Students’ Listening and Speaking Communication and Perceptions
through the Implementation of Chinese Culture Content-Based Course
Masters Dissertation

Xingchun Wang

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to investigate students’ improvements on listening and speaking communications after the implementation of Chinese culture content-based course and perceptions towards the course. Data was drawn from pre and post questionnaires, pre and post interviews, pre and post evaluations and three formative tests on two central questions; first, what extent does Chinese culture content-based course enhance students’ listening and speaking communication; second, what students’ perspectives towards the implementing of Chinese culture content-based course? The participants of this study were thirty second year English major students from Yuxi Normal University in Yunnan China who had passed the CET-4 exam. Thirty students were divided into two groups as 15 students in experimental group while other 15 in control group. Experimental group was implemented the Chinese culture content-based course through content-based teaching approach while control group was implemented through the traditional teaching as they have in their regular studies. The research findings revealed that both experimental group and control group achieved the similar results on listening and speaking from the pre evaluation and had similar perceptions expectantly towards the effectiveness of the implementation of Chinese culture content-based course before the course implementation. However, students from experimental group had improved their listening and speaking ability more significantly than students from control group in three formative tests during their course learning. Eventually, students from experimental group gained more improvements on listening and speaking in post evaluation than students from control group. Conclusively, the content-based approach is more effective on improving students’ listening and speaking ability than traditional teaching method could.

Keywords: Content-based Approach, Listening and speaking ability, Perceptions, Chinese culture content-based course.

Introduction

Even the importance of English as a global language is realized by society in China and English has been required as a compulsory subject in the curriculum of national education, the development of students’ communication ability still been ignored by English language teaching (ELT) in China (Wei, 2004). Most teachers still emphasize on vocabulary translation teaching instead of extend it to communication usage (Boyle, 2000). As the English serve as the international language, one of the most important functions of language is to conduct communication. Similarly, conduct communication in English is one of the core objectives of ELT (Widdowson, 1994).

Speech is a skill to construct a response linguistically based on the received information which happens when speaker receive the information from outside (McKay, 2004). Therefore, listening and speaking are correlated and speaking largely depends on listening (Ellis, 1999). Sterm (1983) states that listening and speaking are two forms which interrelated and cannot be trained alone. According to Sterm (1983), the form of speaking practice depends on the received information source from listening form. Meanwhile, the practice of listening form depends on previously information source received from speaking form. Both listening and speaking contain the procedure of processing information for communication (Boyle, 1984). According to Hughes (2006), listening and speaking are the first pattern that human acquires language which forms the majority of most people’s daily engagement of communication. Rivers (2005) states that during the communication, listening, speaking, reading and writing making up about 46%, 31%, 13% and 10% respectively.

This is only the beginning part of the article. PLEASE CLICK HERE TO READ THE ENTIRE ARTICLE IN PRINTER-FRIENDLY VERSION.

Researcher: Xingchun Wang
Master of Arts in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages
feith@163.com

Advisor Sonporn Sirikhan, Ph. D.
Institution Payap University, Chiang Mai, Thailand

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