Factors Influencing Listening Comprehension.doc

影响听力理解的因素factors influencing listening comprehensioncontentsabstract.1key words.1i. introduction.2ii. what is listening.2iii. literature review.31. interrelationship between listening and other skills.32. bottom-up view . 33. top-down view.44. the relationship between the two processes.4iv. the purpose of listening.5 1. the interpersonal function.52. the transactional function.5v. the factors influencing listening comprehension.61. vocabulary.62. memory.63. background information .74. psychological elements.7vi. the solutions.71. cultivate students interest in listening.72. connect extensive listening and intensive listening together.83. practice in and out of class.84. better the roles of students and the teacher.95. how to treat students in different level.9vii. conclusion.9references10 factors influencing listening comprehensionfactors influencing listening comprehensionabstract: listening is very important in the process of english learning. this article discusses factors which influence learners listening comprehension. altogether there are twenty factors that influence learners listening comprehension, and among them four factors are the most influential. the evidence shows that why listening is difficult comes mainly from four sources: vocabulary, memory, background information, psychological elements. according to these factors, this article will give some solutions to these problems. there are some key factors which can help students to improve their listening abilitycultivate the interest in listening；connect extensive and intensive listening; practice both in and out of class；better the roles of teacher and students and learn how to treat students of different degree. key words: listening comprehension; learning skills; factors 摘 要：听力在英语学习过程中有着非常重要的作用。本文将讨论影响听力理解的因素并且就此对中国的英语学习者进行调查。根据调查显示，总共有二十个因素影响学习者的听力理解，其中在参加调查的四十个学习者中的三分之二认为主要的因素有四个。结果表明听力成为学习者的困难主要有以下四个方面：词汇、记忆力、背景知识以及心理因素。针对这些因素，本文将给出相应的解决办法。一些主要的因素可以帮助学生提高他们的听力水平-培养学生听的兴趣，精听与泛听相结合，在课堂内外练习，优化老师与学生的角色并且学会对待不同程度的学生。关键词：听力理解；听力技巧；因素i. introduction listening, the most frequently used language skill plays a significant role in daily communication and educational process. studies reveal that most people spend as much as 90 percent of there working life in one of the four modes of communication: speaking, reading, writing, and listening. of these four modes, we devote over half of our time to listening. we spend about 30 percent of our time listening to mass communication media (radio, tv, internet) and about 25 percent listening to other people (or on the telephone). clearly then, listening is a critically important skill to master. in spite of its importance, listening ability development has received only slight emphasis in language instruction.for non-native speakers of english who are in the abroad and come in contact with native english speakers on a regular basis, listening may also prove to be a vitally important skill to master. but most of the english learners think that the most bothering and most difficult is listening comprehension. without question, it is difficult for a non-native speaker to understand the listening material, if he hasnt enough vocabulary and the ability of telling the grammar construction.this article discusses factors that influence learners listening comprehension and then give some solutions to solve these problems for helping the learners to improve their listening comprehension.iiwhat is listeninglistening is the ability to identify and understand what others are saying. this involves understanding a speakers accent or pronunciation, his grammar and his vocabulary, and grasping his meaning (howatt and dakin1974). an able listener is capable of doing these four things simultaneously. willis (1984:134) lists a series of micro-skills of listening, which she calls enabling skills. they are:1) predicting what people are going to talk about2) guessing at unknown words or phrases without panicking3) using ones own knowledge of the subject to help one understand4) identifying relevant points; rejecting irrelevant information5) retaining relevant points (note-taking, summarizing)6) recognizing discourse markers, e.g. well, oh, another thing is, now, finally etc.7) recognizing cohesive devices, e.g. such as and which, including link words, pronoun, references, etc.8) understanding different intonation patterns and uses of stress, etc. which give clues to meaning and social setting9) understanding inferred information, e.g.speakers attitude or intentionsiii. literature reviewthe study of listening began in 1920s and has never stopped. altogether there are three theories which are acceptable in the world. 1. interrelationship between listening and other skillsit is obvious that listening has a direct influence on communication. rivers (1966:196), who has been “long an advocate for listening comprehension” (morley 2001:70), had enough foresight to say that, “speaking itself does not constitute communication unless what is been said is comprehended by another person”, and that “teaching the comprehension of spoken speeches is therefore of primary importance if the communication aim is to be reached”. besides, listening is connected with other language skills (omalley, chamot & kupper 1989, hirai 1999), especially reading skills. this is of particular importance within the chinese context where reading has traditionally been the major focus of english skills learning.there is potential skill transferring from listening to reading. the better listener is usually also the better reader. efficiency in processing spoken language makes reading easier because, despite of the differences between the spoken and written language, they still contain essentially similar lexical, syntactic, and grammatical elements (sticht & james 1984).2. bottom-up viewtwo views of listening have dominated language pedagogy over the last twenty years. one of them is the “bottom-up” processing view. the bottom-up processing model assumes that listening is a process of decoding the sounds that one hears in a linear fashion, from the smallest meaningful units(or phonemes) to form utterances, and utterances are linked together to form complete meaningful texts. in other words, the process is a linear one, in which meaning itself is derived as the last step in the process. in their introduction to listening, anderson and lynch (1988) call this “listener as tape-recorder” view of listening because it assumes that the listener takes in and stores messages in much the same way a tape-recorder does; sequentially, one sound, word, phrase and utterance at a time.3. top-down view the alternative, top-down view, suggests that the listener actively constructs (or more accurately, reconstructs) the original meaning of the speaker using incoming sounds as clues. in this reconstruction process, the listener uses prior knowledge of context and situation within which the listening takes place to make sense of what he or she hears. (context of situation includes such things as knowledge of the topic at hand, and prior events.)an important theoretical underpinning to the top-down approach is schema theory. schema theory is based on the notion that past experiences lead to the creation of mental frameworks which help us make sense of new experiences. the term itself was first used by the psychologist bartlett(1932), and has had an important influence on researchers in the areas of speech processing and language comprehension ever since. bartlett argued that the knowledge carried around in our heads organized into interrelated patterns. they are like stereotypical mental scripts or scenarios and events, built up from numerous experiences of similar events. during the course of our lives we build up literally hundreds of the mental schemas, and they help us make sense of the many situations we find ourselves in during the day, from catching the train to work, to taking part in a business meeting, to having a meal.4. the relationship between the two processesthese days it is generally recognized that both bottom-up and top-down theories are applicable in explaining how listeners understand what they hear. since listening is a complex psychological process, it would be risky to survey it from a partial point of view. therefore in a listening comprehension class teachers should develop their teaching techniques with consideration of both theoretic models. either in the designation of a listening course or in the practice of a listening class not only is it necessary to improve students ability to discriminate between minimal pairs, but also it is important to help them use what they have already known to understand what they hear. thus when a teacher sees gaps in students knowledge, the listening task can be preceded by designed activities to prepare learners for it. without the bottom-up processing, the listener wont understand the utterance. but with the bottom-up processing alone, his understanding would be limited due to lack of background knowledge. the following material provides a good example:sally first tried setting loose a team of gophers. the plan backfired when a dog chased them away. she then entertained a group of teenagers and was delighted when they brought their motorcycles. unfortunately, she failed to find a peeping tom listed in the yellow pages. further more, her stereo system was not loud enough. the crab grass might have worked but she didnt have a fan that was sufficiently powerful. the obscene phone calls gave her hope until the number was changed. she thought about calling a door-to-door salesman but decided to hang up a clothesline instead. it was the installation of blinking neon lights across the street that did the trick. she eventually frames the ad from the classified section. (stein and albridge 1978) when first heard, the material may seem hard to understand. but when the top-down processing functions with the information, the listener would gain a compendium image: getting rid of a troublesome neighbor, and the general idea may come to light. so at the beginning stage of learning a foreign language, teachers should employ both the top-down and bottom-up processing theories simultaneously in the listening class. when they focus on the top-down processing, teachers should examine students familiarity with the situation, their background knowledge, and their purpose of listening before the listening training begins. iv. the purpose of listening we can classify the thousands of purposes in the use of a language into 2 categories: to communicate and to exchange information, and respectively name them the interpersonal function and transactional function. 1. the interpersonal function the interpersonal function means that the purpose of using the language is to communicate, when the speakers focus on the harmonious relationship between them, rather than exchange information. although the speakers may exchange information during the conversation, its secondary to the main purpose. this generally happens when people greet, chat, or try to kill time with friends. 2. the transactional function the transactional function means that the main purpose of using the language is to exchange information. this function focuses on information but not the relationship. the speaker cares whether the information is expressed exactly and whether the listener understands it correctly or not, so the language should be direct and brief. v. the factors influencing listening comprehensionthere are many factors that influence learners listening comprehension, and among them there are four factors that play important roles in listening comprehension. they are: vocabulary and idiom, memory, educational level and background, psychological elements.1. vocabulary vocabulary is the most detailed part of language knowledge. large number of vocabulary will help you to do well in listening comprehension and master the listening materials quickly. in order to know others idea and express oneself, thousands of words and short phrases are very necessary.without question, it is difficult for a middle school student to understand the listening material, if he hasnt enough vocabulary and the ability to marster the grammar structure. about 35% of the students with low listening comprehension this is because they dont understand or know the knowledge about linguistic; they are not able to tell the meanings of what they have heard. in 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, only 5% of them thought it was a little difficult, on the other hand the response ability is also another reason.2. memoryalthough listening and reading are both regarded as inceptive skills, listening is more difficult than reading. when reading something, readers could come back to the previous part to reread, while for listeners, they couldnt. if you can not concentrate, you will miss the important information, even the whole part. if you miss the past material, you probably will recall the missing part. under this circumstance, you may lose the following part. so in this case, memory becomes very important in listening comprehension. trying to remember as much content as possible becomes the main goal for the english learners during listening process.3. background informationlanguage is the appearance of culture. students who want to learn english well must have certain knowledge about history, language and culture, even know something about their local conditions and customs, their living style and habits. for lacking of such knowledge, some students have difficulties in listening. for example, “thanksgiving”, “april fool” often appears in some listening materials. english usually greet each other by talking about the weather but our chinese are in a different matter. if students have little knowledge about these, they will feel puzzled. in most time, chinese would like to ask others, “what is your wifes job?” and the partner would never mind answering this kind of questions. but the english are not willing to talk about their privacy such as age, salary and so on. asking about such things is usually thought to be uncultured. so during the course of english learning, students should try to accumulate more knowledge, which is about local conditions, culture, history and politics of western countries in order to understand and master the content of the listening materials theyve heard.4. psychological elements as we know, listening is a psychological process in which the listener gains information actively. only when the information is necessary or interesting will the students concentrate on it. a psychological research shows junior high school students can concentrate for 25 minutes while senior high school students 40 minutes. if the students are made to listen without preparation or guidance, its certain that they will be nervous. if they are often asked to listen in such a poor psychological situation, it will have bad effects on their confidence. we should get the students prepared before listening, and wed better adopt all kinds of ways to help them develop their psychological qualities.vi. the solutions1. cultivate students interest in listeningwe all know that interest is the most active factor in learning. so cultivating students interest in learning cant be ignored. in order to do this, the thesis sums up the following steps：a. choose humorous, various, interesting and comparatively easy materials. since lacking of practice in listening, even though some listening materials are much easier than reading materials, students would concentrate their mind on the materials more easily. once students find they can understand some part of the materials, they will have a sense of harvest so that they would have more interest in training.blower the degree of difficulty and choose suitable training styles. for example, we may watch a slide show and listen to the tape at the same time or read the materials while listening. according to different degree of difficulty, they can have the following training types：reading while listening； reading after listening；listening after reading；listening without reading. here reading means reading materials while listening means listening to the record .difficulty could be controlled by various training styles. before listening to the materials, teachers should introduce the story briefly or play some types of english songs so that the students would get better achievements in the following class.cstudents are required to form a good habit of listening choose some fixed time every week to listen to the radio or tapes. teachers should inform student how to use listening laboratory properly in order to form a foundation for long-period standardized listening training.2. connect e