文档介绍：Chapter One Introduction
Rationale
News listening has e increasingly important in college English instruction.
College English Curriculum Requirements (2007) has stipulated that, at the basic
level of requirements, students should be able to understand English radio and TV
programs spoken at a speed of about 130 to 150 words per minute (wpm), grasping
the main ideas and key points; at the intermediate level of requirements, students
should generally be able to follow talks and lectures in English, to understand longer
English radio and TV programs on familiar topics spoken at a speed of around 150 to
180 wpm, grasping the main ideas, key points and relevant details; at the advanced
level of requirements, students should, by and large, be able to understand radio and
TV programs produced in English-speaking countries and grasp the gist and key
points. And many college teachers are already using authentic news reports produced
by VOA, BBC, CNN, AP News, NPR and so on, as the listening materials for the
students. Besides, the -based College English Test Band 4 and 6 has increased
the weighting of English prehension in its listening part, which imposes
higher requirements on students’ English news listening abilities.
Although the is rich in English news resources, huge variations in the
length of the news exist. For example, BBC has One-Minute World News; ABC
produces News in 90 seconds; VOA, BBC and NPR have five-minute news consisting
of three or more short news items; on the homepage of VOA and NPR, news of every
length is available. Some language teachers choose shorter listening passages for
students with the idea that longer ones may overload them.
However, little research has been done with respect to the relationship between
text length and listening task difficulty. We have not been able to tell whether the text
length has any effect on the task difficulty of English news listening.
1
Purposes