论文总字数：30704字

摘 要

目前在我国，英语学习者在听力理解方面存在困难。然而听力理解水平的提升仍然主要依赖于英语听力课堂上的机械操练。事实上，听是一个声音信号输入的过程，因而对输入的声音进行精确地解码理解是至关重要的一步。那么语言的最小单位—语音音素就对听力理解的过程产生了影响。所以为了改善目前的听力教学的模式与提升学生听力能力，本论文从语音层面出发，旨在分析语音知识对听力理解的影响并根据二者关系提出有效的听力教学方式。

关键词：英语学习者；听力理解；语音知识；听力教学方式

Contents

1. Introduction 1

2. Literature Review 2

2.1The correlation between phonetics and listening comprehension....................2

2.2 The study of listening teaching 3

3. An Analysis of How Phonetic Knowledge Affects Listening Comprehension 3

3.1 Phonemes on listening 4

3.2 Liaison, assimilation and plosives in speech flow 4

3.3 Stress and intonation on listening comprehension 6

4. Pedagogical Implications on Listening Teaching 8

4.1 The combination of phonetic teaching and listening teaching. 8

4.2 The requirements and principles teachers need to follow 11

5. Conclusion......................................................................................................11

Works Cited 13

1. Introduction

There is no doubt that English is the most widely used language in the world. More important, it has been the necessary tool for communication in many fields: economy and trade, business and science, politics and education and so on. In the past decades, for keeping pace with the development of globalization and for the comprehensive development of individuals, China has put English at an important place in education. English teaching has also gone through several reforms. As we all know, listening, speaking, reading and writing are the main aspects of English learning. As to the four skills, in the 1970s, the linguist Rivers pointed out that in human’s daily communication, listening accounts for 45%, speaking 30%, reading 16%, writing 9%. Obviously, the listening ability is more of significance than other three skills. However, in China, English learners, especially middle and high school students have considerable problems in listening. It is common that they can do well in English writing and reading but fail to get foreigners across or successfully communicate with them. Besides, mechanical drills dominate our listening lessons in which students are required to repeatedly listen to numerous listening materials, which unfortunately don’t work too much. Sure enough, listening comprehension, from language information reception to meaning construction, is a complicated process. As an old saying goes, a miss is as good as a mile. That is to say, the comprehension can be misled by even tiny errors in any link of listening process. A good beginning is half done. The perception of phones, as the starting point of listening, reveals that the proficiency of phonetic knowledge can ease listening comprehension process. According to the English Curriculum, students should be given accurate English phonetics teaching to improve their overall pronunciation and intonation. However, as a result of the exam-oriented education, English teaching focuses on students" writing, grammar, vocabulary application ability, to ensure students ideal performance in the examination, while effective phonetic teaching activities are seldom carried out in middle schools or primary school, which becomes a barrier for listening comprehension. Therefore this paper focuses on the analysis of the effects of phonetics on listening comprehension to conclude the correlation between them and get inspirations from the correlation to come up with other listening teaching methods from the perspective of phonetics. This thesis has five chapters. Chapter one is introduction part. Chapter two is a list of the ideas and works referred to. Chapter three emphasizes how phonetic knowledge affects listening comprehension. Chapter four is a focus on pedagogical implications on listening teaching. Chapter five is the conclusion part.

2. Literature Review

In human’s communication, Rivers finds that listening plays an important role in that the amount of time for listening in daily life is twice larger than that for speaking, four times than reading, five times than writing. And also, long proposes many second language acquisition theories, all of which emphasize the significance of listening. Michael Rost points out that comprehension is often considered to be the first goal of listening. Listening comprehension is widely used to refer to all aspects of listening and it is a complicated process when perceiving speech, recognizing words, employing phonotactic rules and structuring sentence meaning by grammatical rules are dealt with step by step. (Rost, 2005). To sum up, listening is important but difficult to English learners. And it’s urgent to upgrade English learners’ listening ability.

2.1 The study of the correlation between phonetics and listening comprehension

Phonetics is concerned with describing speech. Speech production is the result of movements of the tongue and lips. These movements can be thought as gestures forming particular sounds. We can convey information by gestures of our hands that people can see, but in making speech that people can hear humans have found a more efficient way to impart information. The gestures of the tongue and lips are made audible so that they can be heard and recognition. Phonetics is a complex course which has both the segmental feature and some suprasegmental features. The segmental features include the pronunciation of the individual speech sound, the strong and weak forms of certain words, assimilation, liaison and plosives and so on. While suprasegmental features refer to stress, intonation patterns and so on. (Ladefoged, 2001)

Apparently, Spoken languages are the output of sound information which is composed of phonetic features such as liaison, assimilation, intonation patterns and stress. And actually these phonetic features are closely related to our listening activity and it is because of these features that listening becomes difficult for second language learners. In a word, phonetic elements can highly influence the processing of speech and listening comprehension can be blocked if they are not well dealt with (Brown, 2001). The listening strategies put forward by Nunan (2001) put emphasis on phonetic knowledge. He proposes that phonetic features could help learners to identify the speaker’s meaning such as attitude and the information in the context.

It is also pointed out that listening comprehension happens in the process of encoding of the speaker and decoding of the listener. The inconsistency between them can cause obstacle in comprehension. A listener perceives the acoustic information first. Thus, an accurate decoding of acoustic information is crucial to bridge the comprehension and only with a proficiency of phonetic and phonological rules can the listener successfully respond to the speaker. (Huang Hebin, 2001)

2.2 The study of listening teaching

Actually, there are no fixed patterns for listening teaching. At different times in history, teaching theories of listening bear different features affected by various teaching ideas. Audiolingual method was once popular which focuses on listening and imitating pronunciation and grammatical patterns but with little attention to comprehension. (Wang Yan, 2012). Krashen’s input hypothesis has a profound impact on listening teaching. The method emphasizes the significance of comprehensible input.(Rost,2005). The communicative method and task-based method also catches on in listening class. Teachers and researchers make many efforts to improve second language learners’ listening ability such as exercises before listening, background information and so on.

3. An Analysis of How Phonetic Knowledge Affects Listening Comprehension

Many learners usually complain that foreigners speak so quickly that they can not get the precise information. Actually, it is not always because native speakers speak too quickly but because students’ phonetic knowledge is poor that makes they fail to respond quickly and correctly to what foreigners say. There are many pronunciation rules in English. English learners need to grasp phonetics well. As to how phonetic knowledge affects listening comprehension. This part will analyze segmental and suprasegmental factors one by one.

3.1 Phonemes on listening

As Nunan says (2001), Phonemic units are decoded and linked together to form words, words are linked together to form phrases, phrases are linked together to utterances, and utterances are linked together to form complete meaningful texts. Thus, phonemes are the basis of the texts and because of this they are largely influential in listening. To Chinese students, the pronunciations of some phonemes are quite similar, so are the pronunciations of words composed of these phonemes. For example, /e/ and /æ/, /i:/ and /I/, the words constituted by these phonemes can easily confuse listeners. “Pet” and “pat”, the two words with only one different phoneme own totally different meanings. In English, there are many words which sound alike such as “bad” and “bed”, “snack” and “snake”. The tiny difference in phoneme makes listening difficult for students. What’s more, the pronunciation of phonemes can be important grammatical hints. /t/, /d/, /v/, /s/ and /z/ in the suffix are the sole clue to judge tense, plural or singular noun and affirmative and negative sentences, which decides the accuracy of the comprehension of sentences. Here is an example. The two sentences, “They share all the food” and “They shared all the food” differ in tense. To sum up, phonemes play a role in the process of listening comprehension.

3.2 Liaison, assimilation and plosives in speech flow

Different from written words, there is no space between two words to separate them in natural speech flow of spoken language. To mother tongue, people think that every word is separate and has boundary. Actually, it is an illusion. When listening to an unfamiliar language, we can find that in the successive speech flow, there is no obvious boundary between words. Pauses existing in speech stream are determined by sense-group not single word. The border between two words is not clear and conversely two words can influence each other and this leads to variation. Therefore, the pronunciation of a single word can sound different from that in a sentence and this can make listening task a challenge for second language learner. Liaison, assimilation and plosives are main causes of the variations of word pronunciation in a sentence. English learners need to have a good command of this phonetic knowledge for good listening.

3.2.1 Liaison

Liaison is a rule to make the sentence fluent by the combination of some vowels and consonants or vowels and vowels and so on. For instance, “pick it up” is read like “/"pi ki tʌp/. “What is this” is read this way /wʌtiz’ ðis/. This kind of situation can easily confuse students and they can’t figure out what the speaker says. Besides, the listeners may misunderstand the information. They can mistake the sentence “John won an award” as “John wound the world” or” John wants a word”. Actually, liaison is so extremely common that we can’t avoid it. When it appears, there comes along the possibility of misunderstanding.

3.2.2 Assimilation

Daniel Jones (1999) described assimilation as the process during which a sound in a word or sentence is influenced by its adjacent sound and is substituted by this sound. When we speak, we tend to decrease the unease of articulation. This rule would be more apparent when we speak in a quick way. For instance, “Tinned meat” is presented as“/tim ‘mi:t/. The /n/ sound is assimilated to /m/“didn’t you” sounds like /di(d)n(t)-chu/. Those learners with poor knowledge of phonetic knowledge can mistake these words as other ones or even think the words are new to them. Like liaison, assimilation tends to cause misunderstanding of spoken language, too.

3.2.3 Plosives

Plosives as well as liaison make sentences smooth and coherent. In a sentence, when a word ends with a plosive and behind the word is another one starting with a plosive, the former plosive can be almost deleted. The common plosives are /p/, /b/, /t/, /d/, /k/, and /g/. Take the sentence I can’t come as an example “can’t” ends with the consonant /t/, while the word “come” starts with /k/. Eventually, the sound /t/ is not made. But the time of producing this sound /t/ and the shape of mouth are remained. The sentence can be easily mistaken as the opposite version--- I can come, causing misunderstanding. The following are other cases.

A bi(g) pig

The timi(d )rat is scare(d )to death

Don’ (t )was(te) time chatting all day long

3.3 Stress and intonation on listening comprehension

As the author talks above, Liaison, assimilation and plosives play an important role in listening comprehension. Besides this, all the information, emotion and thoughts the speaker expresses are revealed in his or her voice. We can call them voice messages. This thesis will talk about two aspects which affect a speaker’s voice messages: stress and intonation.

3.3.1 Stress

Stress is mentioned by Peter Ladefoged (2001), in this way: Stress is a suprasegmental feature of utterances. It appears not to individual vowels and consonants but to whole syllables. A stressed syllable is pronounced with a greater amount of energy than an unstressed syllable and is more prominent in the flow of speech. Word stress is important for students to memorize words. In some cases, word stress can be the only gist to distinguish one word from another. The position of the stress in an English word may affect the meaning of the word even the word class. The following words are totally the same in spelling but different in meaning or word class.

" import --im"port "conduct--con"duct

" envoy --en"voy " permit--per"mit

" research--re"search " perfect--per"fect

Word stress is important for students to memorize words. Most Chinese students are accustomed to reciting words along the word list but ignore the memorization of the word stress. Subsequently, because of no accurate store of word stress in mind, learners themselves can’t pronounce the word correctly and even mistake it in listening, causing misunderstanding in communication.

Words have stress. So do sentences. The stress in a sentence directly decides the rhythm. In a sentence, verb, noun, adjective, and adverb are usually stressed. As to the sentence stress, Daniel Jones (1999) pointed out that the place of the stress in a sentence is decided by the importance of the word meaning expressed in the sentence. Generally, the more important the word meaning is, the more stress will be laid on it. Thus, stress in a sentence is aimed to emphasize a speaker’s intention or messages. As a result, special attention to sentence stress is an effective way to grasp the main idea of what the speaker says and to sense the speaker’s attitude or feeling. For example, among the sentence “Didn’t I tell you yesterday?”, “didn’t” should be emphasized. The speaker means that he did tell the man, and he is a little annoyed that why the man didn’t know. Students need to be more aware of the stress in a sentence, and it will be of great help to get dialogue information and feel the speaker’s mood.

3.3.2 Intonation

Pitch, stress and sound length are tired collectively in the sentence, known as intonation. Intonation plays an important role in the conveyance of meaning in oral English. It involves four tones, failing tone, rising tone, fall-rise tone, and rise-fall tone. Intonation may indicate the personal characteristics of a person or convey a great deal of nonlinguistic information about the speaker’s emotional state—whether the person is calm or angry, or happy or sad. Anyway, a speaker will underline some words by changing tones to deliver his or her semantic information or nonlinguisic information. It is thus clear that ignorance of intonation can influence the accurate acquisition of the speaker’s information, doing no good to listening comprehension. The same sentences may have different meanings because of the change of intonation by changing tones. The following is a typical case.

That’s not the book he wants

That’s not the book he wants

That’s not the book he wants

Spoken in the failing tone, version (A) simply states a fact. The book is not the one he wants; Version (B), spoken in the rising tone, indicates uncertainty on the part of the speaker. He is asking: Is that not the book he wants; Version(C), presented in the fall-rise tone, indicates that apart from what is said literally, there is an implied message. Besides telling the listener that book in question is not the one he wants, the speaker implies that there is some other book he wants. Similarly, the sentence “I can’t eat anything”, when said in a falling tone, is equal to “I can eat nothing”. But if the sentence is said in fall-rise tone, it implies that there are particular things I can’t eat. Generally speaking, better understanding the listening materials through intonation will be beneficial to listening comprehension.（Dai Weidong, 2013,)

4. Pedagogical Implications on Listening Teaching

4.1 The combination of phonetic teaching and listening teaching.

As this paper analyzes above, phonetic knowledge does have considerable impacts on listening comprehension. Hence, we can try to enhance the phonetic teaching and gradually improve English learners’ listening ability.

4.1.1 Teaching of standard phonetic alphabet

The pronunciation of a word is composed of phonemes. Accurate store of pronunciation in mind is significant in listening. Teachers need to be professional in phonetics and help students with authentic phonetic teaching. The phonetic alphabet is the effective standard teachers can follow. The teaching of phonetic alphabets can be arranged into listening class. Students can easily mistake the phonetic alphabets with similar pronunciation. Thus, in listening class, exercises or training aimed at distinguishing the phonetic alphabet pair with similar pronunciation should be enhanced. Before class, teachers need to make full preparations for the training. Authentic listening materials are a must and the clarity is a need. For the sensitivity to the tiny difference of the pronunciation of the phonetic alphabets, we can do exercises by listening to sentences in class. Two sentences are put in pairs, completely the same but different in one word. The two words are put at the same place and differ in one phoneme. The examples are as followed.

/s/-/z/ What was the price?

What was the prize?

/e/-/æ/ Can I use your pen?

Can I use your pan?

/e/-/ei/ They fell at every attempt

They fail at every attempt

Good proficiency of phonetic alphabets and articulating correctly can avoid the misunderstanding of the information in communication and be a plus to improve students’ listening ability.

4.1.2 The perception of liaison, assimilation and plosives in listening class

Rost (2005) points out that perception of the change of phonemes is as important as the prototype of phonemes. And the phenomenon is common and teachers should let students know the importance in listening. Perception exercises in listening class can’t be avoided. For the variations of the pronunciation of phonemes can confuse students and mislead the comprehension of what the speaker says, students themselves need to realize and command the rules themselves with the help of teachers. Movie clips are good choices to cultivate learners’ awareness of liaison, assimilation, and plosives.

Movie clips are used as listening materials, which should pronounce clearly and be easily understood. Before listening, students get the text in which the actors’ lines are written. Then, learners listen to the video and repeat what the actors say. After that, teachers read the text one word by one word and then read in a sentence. From this design, students can feel the change of pronunciation of some words and with that teachers can explain the variations to learners. Phonetic knowledge input can thus be input before a large number of listening exercises.

At least two lessons should be spent to finish the input of phonetic knowledge. And then, more listening exercises can be carried out. Dictation and listening to daily dialogues are widely used in listening class to improve students’ sensitivity to the variations and polish up their abilities of identifying the pronunciation of words. Gradually, learners become increasingly familiar with the rules and can avoid the misunderstanding that may be brought out by liaison, assimilation and plosives.

4.1.3 Stress and intonation in listening teaching

As this thesis analyzes above, stress and intonation can affect the holistic comprehension of the listening materials. In listening class, teachers need to design the corresponding teaching procedures to help students understand the speaker well. Word stress can influence the meaning and the word class. For this part, teachers can prepare plenty of typical word pairs with different stress to make a comparison and then play the tape where one word pair is put into two sentences. After that, students figure out what the meaning is. This method can help learners to distinguish the similar words and avert the mistakes of words. Another stress which should be paid attention to is sentence stress. Sentence stress is the conveyance of the emphasis of a sentence and can reveal the attitude or emotion of the speaker. After exercises of perception of word stress, sentence stress exercises follow the former. First, perceiving the sentence stress is the warming-up. For example, play the tape. There are the same three sentences with only stress difference is shown and three questions are put forward according to the stress in each sentence.

Mary went to the cinema yesterday evening

(Who went to the cinema yesterday evening?)

Mary went to the cinema yesterday evening.

(What did Mary do yesterday evening?)

Mary went to the cinema yesterday evening.

(When did Mary go to the cinema?)

The first sentence emphasizes that it is Mary who went to the cinema yesterday evening, not any other person. Sentence two puts emphasis on what Mary did yesterday evening. She watched movies but not other things. The last sentence underlines the time when Mary went to the cinema. This example showed the characteristics and functions of sentence stress. This kind of exercises should be designed more. And also, enough enhancements later, students need to listen to integrated listening materials. After listening, what a teacher is required to do is not only checking the answers but also analyzing the word stress and sentence stress in the context and point out the different function they serve. More importantly, teachers are supposed to encourage students to read the listening materials with different stress to show their own emphasis, attitudes or emotions by impromptu. By this, students are inculcated with the natural consciousness of stress, which can be an aid in listening comprehension. Another factor is intonation. The four tones are very functional in information delivery. Actually, the authentic spoken language with obvious intonation is quite different from what English learners speak, which adds difficulties to listening comprehension of English learners. Movie clips here are widely useful in listening class. Teachers ought to prepare videos with different emotions, such as happiness, surprise, doubt, indifference and anger and so on. Students can feel intonations by listening and imitate the actors in the video and can try to act in another way to show their own emotions. This activity can cultivate students’ ability to be sensitive to the intonation and have learners get deep understanding of what speakers say. What’s more, after listening the conversations or short passage, teachers need to analyze the intonation and point out the semantic or nonlinguistic information it carries or encourage students to do this by themselves. Thus, the timely feedback can enhance students’ comprehension of intonation and equip them with the ability to quickly and accurately work out speaking information.

4.2 The requirements and principles teachers need to follow

The combination of teaching of phonetic knowledge and listening teaching is extremely challenging to teachers, which raises high requirements on teachers. First of all, phonetics is a very rigorous and complicated course. Teachers need to be professional in this field and therefore can give students accurate and authentic teaching. Secondly, as this paper talks above, accurate pronunciation is a key in listening teaching. Consequently, teachers themselves are required to master good pronunciation. What’ more, this thesis mentions many times that movie clips or listening materials specially designed are employed to do training to help students perceive phonetic knowledge in listening or get a good mastery of listening comprehension ability. These listening training sources come from teachers’ selection and self-design according to the need of training. Under this circumstance, teachers need to be proficient in computer technology. Considering that listening class should give priority to listening practice, the explanations of phonetic rules can’t take up too much time. Besides, teachers are supposed to bear in mind that they are just the guiders in class and try to boost the students to conclude the rules by themselves. Last but not least, video clips should be shown at the appropriate time to draw learners’ attention and cultivate their interest in listening.

1. Conclusion

Listening comprehension is of great significance in the skills of English learning. However, it is also difficult for English learners to upgrade the ability. Most learners show that their motivations are not strong, partly because although practice listening with an increasing number of listening exercises never stops, the level or the efficiency of listening is still very low. As a matter of fact, many listening teaching methods are proposed. We can find that some of the methods mention the role of phonetics in listening comprehension. And truly, phonetics fundamentally impacts listening comprehension process in many aspects. By the combination of phonetics and listening teaching, we hope to find a sally point to overcome the difficulty of listening and bring much fun into listening class from the perspective of phonetics. Admittedly, there are many limitations here. Only phonetic knowledge is not enough to improve listening ability. Considerable other factors can be involved. But the study of phonetic knowledge’s effects on listening comprehension is worth conducting and the teaching method mentioned in chapter 4 is worthwhile to carry out, too, which can be the basis to improve the listening condition.

Works Cited

Brown.A. Teaching English Pronunciation. Beijing: World Publishing Corporation, 1992.

Daniel, Jones. English Pronouncing Dictionary. Shanghai: Shanghai Foreign Language Education Press, 1999.

Ladefoged,Peter. A Course in Phonetics. USA: Harcourt College Publishers,2001.

Nunan, David. Second Language Teaching and Learning. Beijing: Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press,2001.

Michael Rost. Teaching and Researching Listening. Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press, 2005.

Rivers, W.M. Teaching Foreign Language Skills(2nd edition). Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981.

戴玮栋《新编简明英语语言学教程第二版》，上海：上海外语教育出版社，2013

[Dai Weidong. A New Concise Course in Linguistics for Students of English(2nd edition). Shanghai: Shanghai Foreign Language Education Press,2013.]

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