On the afternoon of September 25th, 2017, invited by the School of Foreign Languages of SEU and Jiangsu Collegiate Foreign Languages Teaching and Research Association, Professor Susan Gass delivered a lecture entitled “Listening：The Forgotten Skill” on Jiulonghu Campus of SEU. Prof. Susan Gass is a famous applied linguist, former President of International Association of Applied Linguistics (2002－2008), chief editor of Studies in Second Language Acquisition and a distinguished professor from Michigan State University. Prof. Li Xiaoxiang from the School of Foreign Languages of SEU hosted the event. The attendees of the lecture included teachers and postgraduate students from Southeast University as well as Nanjing University, Nanjing Normal University, Nanjing Agricultural University, Nanjing University of Science and Technology, Nanjing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Nanjing Xiaozhuang Normal University, Yangzhou University and Jiangnan University.
To begin with, Prof. Gass introduced the statistics of American Standardized Testing from 2015 to 2017, based on which she concluded that listening was an important but forgotten skill. Then, she introduced a series of researches concerning listening skill by an initiative study of how captions were important to help improve language learners’ listening ability and it was found that captions played different roles for different target language learners; a further study was made to explore the mechanism of using captions to facilitate listening comprehension by means of eye-tracking tests. Two other researches were then carried out to investigate the relationship between students’ memory mechanism in processing captions and their listening ability.
At the end of the lecture, Prof. Gass had an active communication with teachers and students present. The lecture is enlightening, providing both teachers and students a perfect opportunity to know more about researches in applied linguistics, from choice of topic, research design to insights for future research and study.
Report / Hou Xu
Photo / Chen Xiangyu
