A study of factors influencing listening comprehension

1、 a study of factors influencing listening comprehension摘要：我国加入世界贸易组织后，英语学习在当今社会的发展中越来越重要。虽然英语听力理解在英语四项基本技能听、说、读、写中处于首要地位，但是英语听力理解的水平存在一定的问题，研究影响听力理解的因素和如何提高听力理解水平已迫在眉睫。国内外很多学者对此进行了研究，并提出了各自的观点。本人主要针对影响听力理解的因素和如何提高英语听力理解能力进行了研究。主要从以下几个方面进行分析：（1）国内外关于影响听力理解因素的研究现状。（2）通过本人在实习中的一些经验和调查，阐述一些看法。（3）阐述影响听力理

2、解的语言因素和非语言因素。（4）如何提高听力理解水平。本人通过对此课题的研究，从中学习到很多新的理念，将对本人今后的工作学习有很大的帮助。关键词：听力理解；语言因素；非语言因素abstract: after china enters the wto, learning english is becoming more and more important in our society. listening comprehension，one of the four basic skills, plays a very important role in the learning of engl

3、ish, but there are some problems. its high time we studied what influences listening comprehension and how to improve it. many scholars have studied about this aspect, and they raised their opinions and suggestions. as for me, i study the factors influencing listening comprehension and how to improv

4、e it. i state my ideas mainly according to the following aspects: (1) actuality of factors influence listening comprehension in home & abroad. (2) my experience of teaching practice, and some opinions. (3)the factors influencing listening comprehension: linguistic factors and non-linguistic factors.

5、 (4) how to improve listening comprehension. i learn much new concept form this study, and it will help me a lot in my future study and work. keywords: listening comprehension linguistic factors non-linguistic factorsa study of factors influencing listening comprehension1. actuality of this field: h

6、ome & abroadlistening is regarded as the primary language skill. as we know, in the development of any language, listening and speaking always develop before reading and writing. listening comprehension provides the most necessary condition for communication. its a guarantee of speaking. “in all the

7、 activities of communication, the most basic ability is to understand what the others are saying” 7according to an american research, people spent 70% of their time on all kinds of communication. they communicate with others, receive at least 42% information through listening. and according to 2nd l

8、anguage acquisition theory, language input is the basic requirement of language acquisition, and listening, as a major means of language input, is vitally important in language acquisition.a recent survey on learner listening research found that factors which enhanced or depressed listening comprehe

9、nsion can be summarized into five categories: text type, task, interlocutor, process and listener. situation and problems, hope and difficulty co-exist. on one hand, the increasing social demands and listening tests just added to the annual university entrance examination in 2002 will definitely dra

10、w enough attention of schools, teachers and students, but on the other hand, big class size, limited time, lack of theoretical guidance, lack of audile and visual equipment and materials have become great obstacles for listening training.we all agree that phonological, grammatical and lexical forms

11、are basic factors in listening. but the process of listening is not only bottom-up but also top-down. we cant just focus on the language itself and neglect the context. listeners are not just a recording device. they dont just receive and store audile input. researchers have proved that listeners ca

12、n use background knowledge to analyze, interpret and store information while listening. they dont just rely on the text alone for comprehension. there should be more than checking the listening outcome that our language teachers need to take into account.since the reform and openness policy has been

13、 executed in china, more and more people take english as their 2nd language and the leaders of the ministry of education pay much attention to english study.however, among the four skills (listening, speaking, reading and writing) involved in english acquisition, listening is still a big problem. li

14、stening skills and levels of every student are quite different from each other, some maybe better at it, and some maybe not. this is because english listening comprehension can be influenced by several factors: knowledge of the language, influence of the mother tongue, mentality, cultural background

15、 knowledge, listening habit and so on.2. some investigations in my practice teachingthe teachers often speak of the four skills- listening, speaking, reading and writing. that means each of them is important. you cant say that you have mastered the language without any one of them, listening, one of

16、 the means of language communication, is used most widely in peoples daily lives. about 45%of an adults time concerns listening to other people, listening to the radio, listening to the music.i have done an investigation during my practice teaching. about 43.2% of the students think that the most bo

17、thering and most difficult is listening comprehension, and even some of them have difficulty in understanding their teacher who gives lessons in english.without question, it is difficult to a middle school student to understand the listening material, if he hasnt enough vocabulary and the ability of

18、 telling the grammar construction. in my investigation, about 35% of the students are with low listening comprehension. this is because they dont understand or know the knowledge about english culture and history, thus they are not able to tell the meaning of the materials they have heard. in anothe

19、r investigation, students were asked to listen to a dialogue of 256words, in which the words and grammar have already been learned. but 80% of them thought it was too difficult. then, using the same one as a reading comprehension material, i found only 5% of them thought it was a little difficult.th

20、e material is as follows: “marie was born in poland. she was very interested in physics and she read many books on the subject. in 1891 she went to paris to study physics because at that time women were not admitted to universities in poland. she had very little money to live on and worked very hard

21、 when she was in paris. she lived in a small room and she had to wear an overcoat in her room to keep warm in winter .tow years later she succeeded in taking a first-class degree in physics. and after graduation she took another degree in mathematics.in 1895 she married pierre curie, who was then te

22、aching at the school of physics and industrial chemistry at paris. in 1898 she discovered a new radioactive mineral which she named “polonium” in honors of poland. from then on, she and pierre worked together on their research. they devoted all their time to working in their laboratory. she said the

23、y must work until they succeeded.one evening in 1902 the curies went to have a look at something in the laboratory. it was really a surprise for them to see a tiny soft light from a glass container. the matter that the curies had discovered was radium. it looked like ordinary salt, but was one milli

24、on times more radioactive than uranium. in 1903 marie received her doctors degree for her study on radioactive matter.”itisclearthatthereadingspeedofamaterialalsoaffects.about43%ofthestudentsthought thatthematerialwasreadtoofastandtheycouldntfollow.a lot of students have their own listening habits.

25、some students often try to understand each word or each sentence. they will think hard when they meet some difficult words or sentences, and a great many students could understand the material directly, they often translate the english into chinese in their heart, thinking that only in this way can

26、the sentence be understood. this is also a reason that influences listening comprehension. understanding each word is difficult, and it is not necessary at all. listening is assuming greater and greater importance in foreign language classroom. like reading, it provides input for the efl learners, a

27、nd without understanding input at the right level, any learning simply cannot begin. but how to carry on the classroom listening effectively is still a problem to many efl teachers and learners. people have done much research about it. the well-known expert ur, p.(1996) points out, “in principle, th

28、e objective of listening comprehension practice in the classroom is that students should learn to function successfully in real-life listening situations.”3listening is a dynamic process, not a passive state. listening along with reading has had a traditional label of receptive skill and passive pro

29、cess. jenny thomas and other recent pragmatics pointed out that listeners make constant interpretations as they hear the spoken text according to their own purposes for listening, their expectations, and their own store of background knowledge. so we can reject the conceptualization of listening as

30、a passive act, calling it a listener-as-tape-recorder explanation of listening. this has been also confirmed by anderson and lynch (anderson, a., & lynch, t. 1988, listening, oxford university press, 37)3. factors that influence listening comprehensionlistening is influenced by a variety of factors,

31、 which fall into two categories: linguistic factors and non-linguistic factors. linguistic factors: phonetically factors, lexical factors, grammatical factors and contextual factors. non-linguistic factors: social and cultural background knowledge, mentality, listening habit and so on. meanwhile i w

32、ill mention some other factors that influence learners listening comprehension in this part.3.1 linguistic factorswhat is linguistic? linguistic is usually defined as the science of language or, alternatively, as the scientific study of language. linguistics is a rich and exciting field.it is genera

33、lly agreed that linguistics should include at least five parameters, namely, phonologic, morphologic, syntactic, semantics and pragmatic. the following are these main branches of linguistics that influence listening comprehension.how linguistic factors influence listening comprehension? in the follo

34、wing part, we will discuss some factors that influence listening comprehension, including phonetically factors, lexical factors, grammatical factors, contextual/discourse factors.3.1.1 phonetic factorsphonetics studies speech sounds, including the production of speech, that is how speech sounds are

35、actually made, transmitted and received, the sounds of speech, the description and classification of speech sounds, words and connected speech, etc.if students are lack of the knowledge of phonetics, they may have some problem in listening comprehension. there are some aspects that influence their l

36、istening comprehension. they are stop, stress, linking and intonation.the stop consonants are made by complete stopping of the airflow at some point in the mouth and then for most productions, releasing it into the sound that follows. there are six stops in english: /p/ and /b/ are formed by the lip

37、s, /t/ and /d / are made on the gum ridge behind the upper teeth, and /k/ and /g/ occur at the back of the mouth where the tongue makes a weal with the soft palate. /p/, /t/, /k/ are voiceless stop as they are not accompanied by vibration form the larynx, while /b/, /d/, /g/ are the voiced stops.eng

38、lish stops do not generally cause intelligibility problems among chinese efl learner but some learners may devoice final position voiced stops so that /tb/ may be pronounced as /tp/, /kd/ as /kt/ and /li:g/ as /li:k/. lengthening the vowel before the voiced stops will aid in the perception of a voic

39、ed final stop. /i:/ in need, for example, is usually a little bit longer than /i:/ in neat when they are in similar phonetic contexts. another difficulty for chinese efl learners is the pronunciation of the stops in consonant clusters. drill the sounds in all positions, paying close attention to the

40、 strength of production and the degree of voicing.in speech, stress may be defined as the degree of intensity of loudness placed on a sound,the amount of force one puts on a syllables or word to give it importance. stress is such an important feature of spoken english that it determines not only the

41、 rhythmic flow of words, but also the quality of the vowels.three types of stress can be found in english: primary, secondary and zero. the term primary stress refers to the strong emphasis a speaker puts on the most important syllable of a particular word. secondary stress refers to a less strong e

42、mphasis on the next most important syllable. zero stress refers to any syllable that receives no stress; such syllables are called unstressed syllables. in other words, an unstressed syllable receives no intensity or loudness at all. the frequent occurrence of the unstressed syllable is one of the f

43、undamental characteristics of spoken english, and the one that most distinguishes english from chinese.a stressed syllable may contain any one of the vowel sounds except the schwa, but any vowel except the diphthongs /a/ and /2/ can be reduced to / or /2/. in spoken english, there are many more unst

44、ressed syllables than there are stressed syllables. this explains why the two vowels, / / and /2/, are the most frequently used vowel sounds in spoken english.in a sentence, english speakers joint stressed and unstressed syllables together smoothly. stressed syllables are long, have a pitch change a

45、nd have full vowel sounds while unstressed syllables are short and often have a reduced vowel sound. a reduced vowel sound is a short, unclear vowel sound. the short vowel sound in unstressed syllables is very often the sound / /, which is the most common of all sounds in english.linking is such a c

46、ommon phenomenon that if you pronounce each english word separately when you speak, without linking, english speakers may not understand you. you may have problem on comprehension of the native speech.when speakers of english are speaking, they arrange words into groups and join together the stresse

47、d and unstressed words within the group. they move smoothly from one word to the next without sudden stops. so when we listen to their speech, we hear the end of one word flow straight into the beginning of the next. this phenomenon of joining words together is called linking.following are the vario

48、us ways to help you achieve linking so that you will get a better understanding of listening material:1. to blend or join the final consonant of one word with the initial vowel of the following word, as in “post.office”.2. to link the final vowels /f:/ and /c/ to a following vowel by adding the /r/

49、sound, which is called linking-r, as in “her.own”, or intrusive-r, as in “the idea.of”.3. to make smooth transitions when words are separated by more than two consonants, i.e. treat them as consonant sequences, as in “next.topic”.4. to make smooth transitions when the preceding word ends with a vowe

50、l and the following word begins also with a vowel sound by adding a slight /j/ or /w/, as in “myarm”.5. to change the pronunciation of some final and initial consonants, as in “didyou”.we call the melody of language intonation. intonation refers to the total pattern of pitch changes, i.e., the risin

51、g and falling of the voice when a person is speaking, within an utterance.intonation makes speech meaningful. english intonation adds the meaning of an utterance in two ways:a. it shows the relationship of words within and between sentences;b. it tells something about the feeling of the speaker.in o

52、ther words, different pitches may indicate different meanings for the same utterance. different pitches help us express our feelings: happiness, sadness, surprise, annoyance, anger, and so on. in listening to the meaning of an utterance, therefore, we listen to how speakers talk as well as to what t

53、hey say. the how and what together give us the meaning of an english utterance.to sum up, stop, stress, linking and intonation are four phonetic factors that we have to pay attention to in order to get a better listening comprehension as english learners. as far as a better understanding is concerne

54、d, these four phonetic factors are of equal importance in listening comprehension. being aware of how they influence pronunciation will help english learners a lot in listening materials of various kinds. as a synthetic language, english is relatively difficult for foreign students to pronounce. thu

55、s, english learners with poor pronunciation will have difficulties in listening comprehension. 3.1.2 lexical factorslexicology involves basically vocabulary, word formation and word categories, etc. (1) the limit of vocabulary, there are so many new words in listening material.(2) can not recognize

56、some vocabularies such as the adverbial, verb, conjunction, etc.(3) can not recognize some prefix and suffix. nobody can deny that vocabulary is definitely one of the basically needs of good listening comprehension. without adequate vocabulary, one even can not understand single words not to say the

57、 whole passage .however, with a good command of word formation, one can guess out the meaning of those words that are new to them. so students with either large vocabulary or good at command of word formation can be better at listening comprehension.but only understanding of single words is not enou

58、gh. to understand english at sentence level, one has to know the relationship between those single words .and the understanding of this relationship mainly depends on the understanding of different word categories.to sum up, it is almost impossible to understand english sentences without good comman

59、d of lexicology. 3.1.3 grammatical factorsthere are many complex sentences in the listening comprehension. someone can not distinguish the principal clause and subordinate clause and do not know the relationship between them. so they may misunderstand the meaning of those sentences. students will lose their head when t