To Give Control to Learners or Not? A Comparative Study of Two Ways of Teaching Listening

This paper reports a quasi-experimental study that was carried out in listening classes to address the following questions: What control do students expect in the listening classroom? What are the effects of the “zero class hour” way of teaching listening when more control is given to the students? The study was conducted at Huaiyin Normal University, where two non-English major classes taught by one teacher were selected. A questionnaire survey was conducted to get students’ opinion about the traditional way of teaching listening and what control they wanted to have. The results of the pretest and posttest were analyzed with SPSS. Both the experiment group and the control group made similar progress in the test of their listening comprehension, which indicates that the new way of teaching listening is as effective as the traditional one. From the amount of time that the experimental-group students spent on improving their listening comprehension, we can see that they made more efforts and became more active and more autonomous than before. The findings may give some support for the web-based distance education.