论文总字数：32813字

摘 要

1. Introduction 1

1.1 Need for the study 1

1.2 Research purpose 2

2. Literature review 3

2.1 Related empirical studies about the effect of different speaking rates on listening comprehension 3

2.2 Related empirical studies about the effect of difficulty levels on listening comprehension 5

2.3 Problems in the previous studies 6

3. Methodology 7

3.1 Research questions 7

3.2 Participants 7

3.3 Listening materials and tasks 7

3.4 Procedure of data collection 8

3.6 Data analysis 8

4. Results and Discussions 9

4.1 Results 9

4.1.1 Results of different speaking rates 9

4.1.2 Results of difficulty levels 10

4.1.3 Results of different speaking rates and difficulty levels 10

4.2 Discussions 11

4.2.1 Effects of different speaking rates on listening comprehension 11

4.2.2 Effects of difficulty levels on listening comprehension 12

4.2.3 Effects of different speaking rates and difficulty levels on listening

comprehension 13

5．Conclusions 14

5.1 Major findings of the study 14

5.2 Implications 14

5.2.1 Theoretical implications 14

5.2.2 Theoretical implications 15

References I

Acknowledgements

It is one of the real challenges that I have ever met in my life to finish this paper. This paper is an outcome of support, encouragement and love that I received from a great many people. I would like to take this opportunity to express my sincere thanks to those who have contributed to the completion of this paper.

My deepest gratitude goes to my supervisor, Professor Lu Junhua, for her painstaking effort in guiding me through the various stages of writing this paper. Through the whole working period on the paper, she helped me choose the topic, collected the data, and analyzed the data with the software. If it were not for her patient guidance, continuous encouragement and generous support, I could not have made this work possible. Furthermore, it is my honor to benefit a lot from her personalities and diligence, which I will treasure in my whole life.

I would like to thank all the other teachers for their enlightenment, knowledge, encouragement and help throughout my undergraduate study at Nanjing Tech University.

Special thanks go to my dear friends and fellow students, who have accompanied me throughout the years at the university. They shared happiness and sadness with me and taught me a lot. I always consider our friendship an invaluable treasure and a constant driving force to me.

Last but not least, I would like to extend my sincere thanks to my parents for their love and support all these years.

Abstract

This study focuses on the effects of different speaking rates and difficulty levels on EFL learners’ listening comprehension. The research is aimed to answer the following questions:

1. Is there any effect of different speaking rates on EFL learners’ listening comprehension?

2. Is there any effect of listening materials with difficulty levels on EFL learners’ listening comprehension?

3. Does the effect of difficulty levels on EFL learners’ listening comprehension vary according to the difference of different speaking rates?

The subjects in this study were 56 freshmen of English majors, coming from two paralleled classes in Nanjing Tech University. They were randomly divided into two groups. One group listened the materials at normal speed (130-150 wpm) while the other group listened to those at slower speed (about 120 wpm). The listening materials are composed of four passages, 2 easy ones and 2 difficult ones (tested by the Software Readability and a pretest). All the participants were asked to finish the listening comprehension tests within time.

The MIXED ANOVA of SPSS 21.0 was conducted with the date in the study. The major findings are as follows:

1. Different speaking rates have a significant effect on listening comprehension. It indicates that participants at slower speaking rates perform better in listening comprehension than those at normal speaking rates.

2. Difficulty levels have a significant effect on listening comprehension. It indicates that participants who listen to easy listening materials perform better in listening comprehension than those who listen to difficulty listening materials.

3. There is no significant interaction between difficulty levels and speaking rates in terms of listening comprehension. It indicates that no matter easy listening materials or difficult listening materials, it will not change speaking rates to affect listening comprehension.

Key words: speaking rates; difficulty levels; listening comprehension

中文摘要

本文旨在研究不同语速与不同文本难度对听力的影响。回答以下问题：

1. 不同语速对英语学习者听力理解是否有显著差异？
2. 不同难度的听力材料对英语学习者听力理解是否有显著影响？

3、不同语速和不同文本难度的听力材料对英语学习者听力理解是否有交互影响？

本研究的受试者是56名来自南京工业大学英语专业两个平行班的大一新生。受试者随机分为2组。同样的材料，组一听正常语速（130-150词/分钟),组二听较慢语速(120词左右/分钟)。听力材料包含四篇文章：两篇较简单，两篇较难（由软件readability结合前测选出）。受试者需在规定时间内完成听力测试。

本研究通过SPSS 21.0中的混合方差分析，得出以下结论：

1. 语速对英语学习者听力理解有显著影响。结果显示，慢语速组的被试者表现优于正常语速组的被试者。
2. 文本难度对英语学习者听力理解有显著影响。结果显示，听容易材料的被试者表现优于听较难材料的被试者。
3. 不同语速和不同难度的听力材料对英语学习者没有显著的交互效应。结果显示，语速不同的被试者的听力理解与文本难度没有关系。

关键词：语速 文本难度 听力理解

1. Introduction

The purpose of the study is to explore the effects of different speaking rates and difficulty levels on EFL learners’ listening comprehension. 75% of language communication depends on listening and speaking, among which listening accounts for 45%. Additionally, listening comprehension accounts for 20% in CET4 and CET6 (Huang, 2001). Thus, how to improve and strengthen the students’ listening comprehension has become an important subject.

So far, many researches have investigated the effect of different elements on listening comprehension, such as the mastery of the grammar and vocabulary, the accuracy of pronunciation and intonation, etc. (Xu, 2006; Bu, 2009). There are also some researches both at home and abroad (Liu, 1999; Ahmad, Omid amp; Salman, 2012; Roy, 2002; Tauroza,1997) explore the effect of different English accents on listening comprehension.

1.1 Need for the study

Nowadays, many listening materials both have fast and slow speeds, such as BBC, VOA, which shows that people have realized the relationship between speaking rate and listening comprehension. One of the major problems most EFL listeners complain about is that speech that seems to have exerted an influential effect on their listening comprehension (Abdolmajid, 2010). Wang (2007) finds that the difficulty levels of listening text have an effect on listening comprehension. As the main variables and factors in listening comprehension, speaking rates and difficulty levels have succeeded to grab the scholars’ attention. Some studies have been carried out to investigate the effects of different speaking rates and different difficulty levels on listening comprehension (Tian, 2002; Rong, 2010).

Listening is one of the core courses of College English and plays an important role in the process of English learning. Although teachers and students have put a lot of time and effort into listening, they still achieve a little. Thus, how to strengthen college English listening is an important subject. The current studies have revealed that speaking rates and difficulty levels do influence on learners’ listening comprehension. This research will be carried out to explore the effects of different speaking rates on listening comprehension at different difficulty levels.

1.2 Research purpose

The purpose of the study is to explore the effects of different speaking rates and difficulty levels on listening comprehension. Specifically, with the importance of listening comprehension in English learning, it is significant to explore how the experimental subjects perform when listening materials with different speaking rates and different degrees of difficulty are exposed. Moreover, it is necessary to provide some pedagogical implications on EFL teaching and improve students’ listening comprehension with more scientific methods.

2. Literature review

Nowadays, improving students’ ability of language communication has been the primary goal in the college English teaching. As listening comprehension plays an important role in English study, it has drawn a lot of scholars’ attentions from both home and abroad. However, the present study has viewed speech rate from other perspective to provide some novelty. In this study we will analyze the effects of American accent at different speaking rates on listening comprehension. In this chapter, literature review will be introduced from three parts: the first part will focus on the related empirical studies at home; the second one will emphasize on the related empirical studies abroad; and the third will present the problems in the previous studies.

2.1 Related empirical studies about the effect of different speaking rates on listening comprehension

Liu (2012) explores the influence of different input speech rates on listening acquisition. 80 students from Qufu Normal University are assigned into 4 groups randomly. The listening materials are divided into normal speed (250 syllables per minute) and lower speed (70 syllables per minute). This experiment includes three stages: preheating process (5 minutes), resting stage (10 minutes) and the real testing stage (10minutes). This experiment aims at finding the effect of listening implicit learning on different speaking rates. In the end, he concludes that students’ listening comprehension improve more at normal speed than that at slow speed, and that shortening the process from slow to fast input rate contribute to EFL learners.

Du (2013) carries out an empirical study to explore the effect of textual clues on students’ listening comprehension and whether this is affected by speaking speed. 36 students who take a senior English course are divided into four groups to listen to the following texts: 1) Speech with clue words at normal speed ; 2) Speech with non-clue words at normal speed; 3) Speech with clue words at slow speed ; 4) Speech with non-clue words at slow speed. The results show that clue words play an important role in English listening and speed does not have a significant effect on listening.

Huei-chun’s (2001) study is conducted to investigate the effects of syntactic modification and speech rate on EFL listening comprehension. The subjects were 168 college freshmen in Taiwan. Given the four versions of the listening passage on syntactic modification (unmodified/paraphrase/simple sentence/mixed), plus two different speech rates (average/slow) for each syntactic version, there were altogether eight versions of the listening passage. Subjects were assigned to one of the eight experimental groups according to the results of a randomized complete block design. After listening to the passage, subjects completed a cloze test. The results confirm the significant role played by speech modification in L2 listening comprehension. The study offers empirical evidences for the facilitating effects of syntactic modification and slower speech rate. Finally, the current study proposes some implications for the instruction of EFL listening comprehension.

Mcbride’s (2011) study investigates the effects of training learners of English as a foreign language with different rates of speech and controls over speech rate. Subjects were put into one of four treatment groups: (A) trained on listening comprehension materials recorded at a fast speed, (B) trained on slow recordings, (C) given some choice about the speed, and (D) allowed sometimes to pause playback. The group that was trained on slow materials fared the best, apparently because their bottom-up processing improved. Other groups seem to have developed their strategic listening skills more, but these did not always transfer as well to other contexts. It was also found that learners performed better when they paced their training over several days.

Griffiths (1990) studies the effect of speech rate on comprehension of a semi-scientific text that was read aloud at three different speech rate levels and found that moderately fast speech rates reduced comprehension, but a slow rate of delivery did not increase comprehension significantly as compared to speech delivered at a normal rate. In another descriptive study, Griffiths (1990) states that language learners are likely to meet a far greater speed of rates than the rates investigated in the earlier study. In a similar study but with different materials (stories rather than semi-scientific texts), Griffiths (1992) conducts an experiment on 24 Omani elementary school teachers for a five-week course. He provided three story passages with three different speech rates: slow speech rates, average speech rates, and fast speech rates. Based on the participants’ scores in listening comprehension, he concluded that a slower rate of delivery resulted in better comprehension scores than fast and average rates (although average rates did not lead to better results than fast rates).

2.2 Related empirical studies about the effect of difficulty levels on listening comprehension

In Zheng’s (2010) study, China Daily (CHA) and VOA were selected as the representatives for English news from home and abroad respectively. Two news corpora-CHD corpus and VOA was made from four aspects: phonological, lexical, syntactic and propositional features. The standardized type, average word length, average sentence length etc. were obtained by using Wordsmith Tools 4.0. The proportions of high frequency word in each corpus were obtained by using Vocab Profile computer program. By conclusion, the average speaking rate and information density of each corpus were obtained. It is found that in terms of word length and lexical variation, there is no significant between the two; in terms of speech rate, word frequency and and sytactic complexity, CHD is more difficult than VOA; in terms of propositional, VOA is more difficult than CHD. In order to explore weather there is any difficulty difference in listening comprehension between CHD and VOA news reports, listening comprehension test was administrated by using the listening materials from CHD corpus and VOA corpus (3 from CHD and 3 from VOA). It is found that CHD listening comprehension is significantly easier than VOA. To explain this finding from the perspective of text features, efforts were made to control the effect of item difficulty upon the test result.

Wang (2007) analyzes the listening obstacles (of 100 students in senior І, No.2 Middle school of Wuhan.) caused by listening materials. She clarifies a variety of listening obstacles caused by listening materials, laying the foundation of probing the reasons for them and suggesting strategies in response. And finally she found difficulty levels played an important role in the performance of second language listening comprehension.

2.3 Problems in the previous studies

In the past several decades, the factors that affect listening comprehension have successfully attracted a lot of attentions and more and more scholars come into notice the necessities of studying the subject on how to improve EFL learners’ listening comprehension. Among all the factors that affect comprehension, speech rate and difficulty levels are of crucial importance. However, there still exit some problems in the previous studies.

Firstly, from the previous studies, we can easily find that the studies on listening comprehension are relatively few, compared with those on reading comprehension. Furthermore, there were fewer researches about the interaction between the different speaking rates and the difficulty levels of the text.

Secondly, more studies focus on the theoretical analysis of listening comprehension and didn’t put them into practice. In other words, both qualitative and quantitative analyses should be taken into consideration. And attention should be attached to the possible factors which were easily to be ignored.

Thirdly, the experimental samples in most researches are not representative, which lead to the results of their studies inaccurate and unreliable.

To sum up, there are still many problems in the previous studies, which call for the implement of the current study.

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