Discussion on the Strategies and Difficulties of Teaching and Learning in English News Listening

Abstract

English news listening, as a meaningful part in learning and teaching of the English language, has not received enough attention in higher education, which has brought a negative effect on English-majors’ learning and the development of subject education in listening. This thesis will introduce the importance of English news listening, and the difficulties that students face because of the special characteristics of English news. It will provide three effective strategies on teaching and learning in English news listening. The thesis will enrich future learning and teaching in this field for English majors in colleges and universities, which will help students’ to learn more efficiently and offer useful opinions to teachers for their teaching planning, thus leading to better quality English major students and listening courses. Keywords—English news, Listening Teaching, college students, strategies, English majors I. THE IMPORTANCE OF THE ROLE OF ENGLISH NEWS LISTENING English News listening is a significant part of the content of English listening. The ability to understand news listening is an important criterion for English majors in their knowledge composition and communication skills. According to the "English Syllabus for English Majors in Colleges and Universities" [1], the goal of the English-major student is to create a solid English language foundation and a broad knowledge of culture and to proficiently engage in translation, teaching, management, and research in many specific fields including foreign affairs, education, economics, trade, culture, science and technology, and military, as well as others. To achieve this goal, English listening as one of the four elements of learning English, plays an indispensable role in the process of learning, and the listening comprehension of English broadcast news with its language, vocabulary and cultural characteristics determines its universal significance for English learning. Most materials for news listening are derived from the television and broadcast media of English-speaking countries, which report on all aspects of social life covering politics, economics, culture, education, sports, science and technology, and other topics [2]. It is the most direct and lively reflection of English-speaking society and one of the best materials for English majors to understand the culture related to English. Language is the carrier of culture, and the study of language results in the transmission and spread of culture [3]. Contacting and understanding the culture of other countries is one of the most efficient ways to broaden students’ horizons and cultivate critical thinking. Therefore, it can be seen that English news listening practice has a meaningful position in learning more about diversified cultures for language learners in the context of globalization. The news listening materials contain a lot of new and old vocabulary words and new language phenomena generated in the use of the English language; studying this emerging vocabulary and language phenomena helps in understanding the latest trends in English language development. For English major learners, it can increase the interest in language learning,and constantly update students' cogitation and accumulation of language learning. The formal style of the English news listening material is more rigorous; therefore, it is different from daily communicative language in sentence structure and syntactic features. The latter mainly uses short sentences with relatively random sentence structures. The use of long sentences with relatively complicated structure puts forward higher requirements for language ability and listening comprehension [4]. It also determines that listening teaching of English news is different from listening comprehension teaching of daily spoken language. All English major exams in higher education set up a news listening section. Therefore, for college or university students who major in English to gain excellent English learning skills and achieve good grades, news listening cannot be ignored. II. THE DIFFICULTIES OF LEARNING ENGLISH NEWS LISTENING A. Inadaptability to the Pronunciation Characteristics of English News The prominent feature of international English news is that the broadcast speed is fast and the pause time is short. Its broadcast speed is about 140 words per minute. In a short period of time, the information that students can record, only by memory, is very limited, which causes students to have certain difficulties in understanding the article, and leads to anxiety and resistance towards practicing [5]. In addition, the characteristics of international English news speed are often accompanied by speech phenomena such as liaison, slurring words, reducing sounds, and incomplete plosion during the broadcast process. In news broadcasting, such skills make announcers' pronunciation more labor-saving and their language more fluid, but it is undoubtedly an obstacle for English majors in the English learning period. Moreover, it is a struggle for students to seize the news content, even after repeated listening, due to accent changes in parts of speech of words and the interference of background noise in the news. All the pronunciation features mentioned above in English news listening materials are the difficulties that English major students need to overcome during the learning process. 8th International Conference on Education and Management (ICEM 2018) Copyright © 2019, the Authors. Published by Atlantis Press. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/). Advances in Economics, Business and Management Research, volume 75