The teachers often speak of the four skills- listening, speaking, reading and writing. That means each of them is important. You can't say that you have mastered the language without any one of them, Listening, one of the means of language communication, is used most widely in people's daily lives. About 45%of an adult's time concerns listening to other people , listening to the radio, listening to the music. In linguistics ，giving the students a lot of listening activities is a good way of enlarging their vocabulary. On the other hand, it als o helps the students improve their listening comprehension.

I have done an investigation. About 43.2% of the students think that the most bothering and most difficult is listening comprehension, and even some of them have difficulty in understanding their teacher who gives lessons in English.

Without question, it is difficult of a middle school student to understand the listening material, if he hasn't enough vocabulary and the ability of telling the grammar construction. In my investigation, about 35% of the students with low listening comprehension thing this is because they don't understand or know the knowledge about linguistic, they are not able to tell the means of a what they have heard. In my another investigation, students were asked to listen to a dialogue of 244 words, in which the words and grammar have already been learned. ;But 80% of them thought it was too difficult. Then, using the same dialogue as a reading comprehension material, I found only 5% of them thought it was a little difficult, on the other hand the response ability is also another reason.

It is clear that the reading speed of a material also affects. About 43% of the students thought that the material was read too fast and they couldn't follow.

A lot of students have their own listening habits. Some students often tries to understand each word or each sentence. They will think hard when they meet some difficult words or sentences, and a great many students could understand the material directly, They often translate the English into Chinese in their heart, thinking that only in this way can the sentence be understood. This is also a reason, trying to understand each word is difficult, and it is not necessary at all. You should catch the most important points.

Then how to improve the students' listening skill?

We know the largest difference between mother language learning and foreign language learning is the environment. A child can soon learn his mother language well. He has heard a lot before he can say something and walk. Then after he is able to walk and say, he has a chance of listening to more. Before he goes to school, he has already been a good listener and speaker.

But for a foreign language, you can meet it only in formal places, classes, for example, otherwise, you can hardly have a chance to meet it. So I think you should try to let the students be in a language environment.

Let the students grasp the phonetic symbol. I think the phonetic symbol is the base. A good intonation and phonetic depends on the base. Oral reading after a radio or a teacher is a good way at the beginning, Students should do much about it.

Pay attention to the oral reading skill, It includes stress, strong form, weak form, intonation incomplete plosive consonant, affricate consonant, syllable and so on. Training and practicing the oral reading is not a day's word. The teacher must give correct information about it . There is no easy way.

Enlarge the students' knowledge about English. Encourage the students to read something in their spare time about geography, history, culture, stories and so on. For example, there are two materials of the same difficulty. One explains something about China's Spring Festival, the other is about Thanks giving Day of the western countries. The former is easy to understand but the latter is more difficult. Why? It is clearly because the students know little about the latter.

Both listening test and listening practice are necessary, but practice is more important.

You can understand your students through listening tests. Only through the practice can the students improve their listening comprehension.

2.Speaking

Speaking can't be taught separately. It is often connected with listening. So we often speak of listening and speaking.

The traditional way of listening and speaking is aural-oral method. Now, the new method of two-way communication is very popular.

As you know that any teaching method has its psychological base. The aural-oral method began in the 1940's. It is based on behaviourism. One of its psychological theory is that learning a language is forming a set of new language habit.

This is its usual process: Stimulus-Response-Reinforcement.

The aural-oral method is fit for the teaching of beginning stage. It focuses on the practice of oral English drills. But too many drills are being practiced without any context or given conditions. So what is learned is isolated clauses. And it has few communicative functions .

The two-way communication makes up for the defect in communicative ability in the traditional teaching. Two-way means the relationship of the communication between the teacher and the students.

This relationship is connected with the communicative activities between two people. This method is different from the traditional aural-oral method. But it also bases on the process of S-R-R. So we call it a mew type of aural-oral method has some peculiarities.

It can create a fresh environment for speaking English.

It needs some necessary explanations of Grammar, including some sentence structures.

Hints are the major way of practice.

Teachers can control the practice wholly or partly.

The practice can also be controled by students freely. The internal force of study is not due to the insterests in phonetic structure, but the content of the material.

To make the correct response, the students are asked to pay more attention.

Example:

Teacher: Ask me if I am a student.

Student: Are you a student?

T: Tell me-No, You're a teacher.

S: No, I'm a teacher.

In this example, "Ask me" means that the student must say a question sentence while "Tell me" shows that the student must say a decarative sentence. But before doing this, the teacher must explain something about the exchange of interrogative sentence and declarative sentence.

The two-way communication can lengthen the dialogue limitlessly. This is its advantage. At the same time, if the student wants to give the correct response, he has to think it hard, The sentence is not easily forgotten which is ereated by themselves through thinking, sometimes with the teacher's hint. You can talk freely. You can express yourself as well as you can. For example:

T: Ask me how mang people there are in my family.

S: how many people are there in your family?

T: Tell me-there are five

S: There are five

T: Ask me what my prreuts do.

S: What do your parents do?

T: tell me-your father is a teacher and your mother works in a company.

S: My father is a teacher and my mother words in a company.

T: Ask me if my father likes his job.

S: Does your father like his job.

T: Tell me - Sure, he likes teaching very much.

S: Sure, he likes teaching very much.

All these responses form a complete dialogue.

A: How many people are there in your family ?

B: There are five.

A: What do your parents do ?

B: My father is a teacher and my mother works in a company.

A: Does your father like his job ?

B: Sure, he likes teaching very much.

If you want to ask more about "father" or other family members, the dialogue can go on as far a possible.

So, in a word, the aural-oral method is not a out-of-date one, but a useful one. Especially it is fit for the beginning stage. It attaches the importance to the oral drills, and has a bad communicative function. It is only used to aphonetic base. After all, the aim of the language learning is to communicate. So the two-way comunication is more effective and direct, but it is also fit for the beginning stage.

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