论文总字数：33192字

摘 要

这篇论文主要是关于初中生在英语听力理解方面存在的一些问题以及相关的解决方法。据里弗斯和坦铂利统计，听力技能在四项技能中占比45%, 所以克服听力理解中的障碍显得尤为重要。譬如较差的发音、缺乏背景知识等等，都会造成听力理解问题。这篇论文主要从听力理解问题、造成这些问题的原因和相关的解决策略三个方面分析初中生的听力现状，本论文会让学生更清晰地意识到他们在听力理解方面存在的一些问题，从而采取更有效的策略克服听力障碍并提高自己的听力理解能力。

关键词：问题；听力理解；初中；解决策略

Contents

1. Introduction 1

2. Literature Review 1

2.1 Input hypothesis 2

2.2 Features of listening comprehension 2

2.3 Researches of listening comprehension 2

3. Problems in Listening Comprehension 3

4. Causes of Problems in Listening Comprehension 4

4.1 Lack of vocabulary 4

4.2 Poor pronunciation 5

4.3 Lack of grammatical knowledge 6

4.4 Lack of background information 6

4.5 Psychological factors 7

4.6 Bad habits in listening 8

5. Resolution Strategies 8

5.1 Enlarge students’ vocabularies 9

5.2 Help students practice pronunciation 9

5.3 Guide students to understand the grammatical rules 10

5.4 Provide some background information before listening 11

5.5 Cultivate students’ correct attitude towards listening 11

6. Conclusion 12

Works Cited 14

1. Introduction

Listening is never a passive activity. It is an active process that listener should understand each vocabulary, analyze sentence structure and identify speaker’s intention. So it is a complex process that involves listener’s lots of mental activities. Listening, as an input process, plays a great role in communication and deserves more attention and analysis. Nowadays, different countries around the world are connecting with each other more closely in many parts such as economy, politics, culture and so on. Therefore, having a good command of foreign language is especially important, which can contribute to the exchange of economy, politics and culture. In China, almost every student has learned English. However, it is a common phenomenon that most students can achieve good grades in English exams but cannot use English to communicate with others fluently. The most possible reason accounting for such phenomenon is that students have problems in listening comprehension and they cannot understand others clearly.

Modern linguists hold that speech enjoys priority over writing. Before having a good communication skill, the listener and the speaker are both able to understand each others’ utterances or intentions. So acquiring good listening skills is quite important for everyday communication. This thesis can make students aware of the problems of listening and help them improve listening abilities more effectively.

2. Literature Review

According to Constructivism and input hypothesis, what students have known in their mind makes for the enrichment of knowledge. So listening as an input process is crucial in language learning. During English teaching in junior school, listening is commonly ignored by many teachers. The practice of listening is quite less than that of other three skills. This is why lots of students are very poor at listening. Thus, listening comprehension is worthy of being studied and deserves more attention.

2.1 Input hypothesis

Before outputting something, students should receive enough input of foreign language. Using output to contribute to input will increase the efficiency of language learning. In the last century, Krasen proposed “input hypothesis” which emphasized the importance of language input. He hold that learners advance their language learning gradually by “receiving comprehensible input” which he defined as “i 1”: i represents learner’s current state of knowledge, and the next stage is the i 1.(Daiamp;He 163)

2.2 Features of listening comprehension

Why are students so poor at listening? This may be influenced by its features. First, different people speak one sound differently. For example, dialects in Britain English and American English, intonations, and rhythms all enhance the difficulty of listening. Second, during listening, listeners cannot spend much time figuring out meaning of heard sentences. Otherwise they will miss the following parts. Third, sometimes the quality of listening material may be influenced by background noise which makes listening materials more difficult to hear clearly. To some extent, these features impede students’ listening comprehension.

2.3 Researches of listening comprehension

The study on listening comprehension begins very early. The theoretical research on English listening comprehension is more mature at broad. In 1990, O"Malley amp; Chamot proposed that the metacognitive strategy was quite important to improve listening comprehension. In 1985, the American linguist, S.D.Krashen, explored the process of listening comprehension according to the input hypothesis.In China, many researchers began their studies from these perspectives：cognitive, pragmatics and psychology. Firstly, they analyzed the process of listening comprehension. Then some causes of problems in listening comprehension were studied. In 1991, Wang Wei clearly studied causes of listening comprehension problems and classified them into two types:positive ones and negative ones. The negative ones are the obstacles in listening comprehension. There are still many other researches about listening. From these studies,some effective strategies have been found and applied to enhance students’ listening comprehension.

3.Problems in Listening Comprehension

Listening was once considered as a passive process. However, according to recent researches, listening is considered as an active process. As is known to us, listening is more difficult than reading. While reading, it is possible for the readers to read the text again and again to understand the meaning of sentences. However, during listening,it is unlikely for them to listen to the unintelligible sentences again. The listeners must process acoustical messages in a very short time. They cannot listen to the messages again, especially in real conversation.

In daily life, students seldom talk with others in English because they are often afraid that they cannot hear clearly or cannot understand others well. Why do students seldom communicate with others in English? Why do most EFL students have a poor listening skill? This is a deep issue that needs us to take consideration.

Some problems which Influence EFL listening comprehension must exist. But what are these problems? The most important step is to find these obstacles. During listening comprehension, different students may have different problems. So studies on these problems are not so easy. Till now, different researchers have found different problems. Here Goh’s opinion is mainly discussed. According to Goh’s study, the following problems have been found.（1）Quickly forget what is heard. (2) Do not recognize words they know. (3)Understand the words but not the intended message. (4) Neglect the next part when thinking about meaning. (5) Unable to form a mental representation from word heard. (6) Do not understand subsequent parts of input because of earlier problems.(Goh 60) These problems are very common that most foreign language learners may meet during listening. In junior school, teachers always teach students some new words and important grammatical rules and they often explain new words and grammar by using native language. So students do not form English thinking during learning English. During my experience as a student teacher, the students in junior school even cannot understand the teachers’ simple instructions. This is because they are not used to English immersion teaching. So it is no wonder that most EFL students have poor listening and speaking skills. For me, as an English major, I feel that listening comprehension is not a very easy part and we hardly have chances to practise listening due to lacking of language environment. In our exam, there is a dictation part that we need to listen to a short passage for two or three times then we need to write the whole passage word by word exactly. This is often the most difficult part for us as we need to try our best to understand each word. When we try to understand one unfamiliar word, we often miss the following parts which will cause misunderstanding or frustration in listening comprehension. Such problems are very common during listening. Therefore, it is high time that we should solve these problems which is key to improving students’ listening skill.

4. Causes of Problems in Listening Comprehension

In the 1960s, Chomsky once proposed that pronunciation, grammar and vocabulary existing in one’s language system were quite important during language learning. Also, according to schema theory, schema acts as an bridge between the old and new knowledge and can help learners store new knowledge in their mind. This indicates that teachers should focus more attention on grammar, vocabulary, pronunciation, etc during teaching listening. If students have some deficiencies in these aspects, they will come across troubles during listening comprehension. As we all know, listening always comes before speaking. A good listening skill can guarantee a fluent communication. The above has listed some problems that students may meet while listening to English text. We have known that students with different abilities have different problems. Why do students have these problems? The causes will be discussed here.

4.1 Lack of vocabulary

Language learning is a process of construction. Just like building a house, amounts of bricks will be needed. The function of vocabulary is the same with brick’s. Without adequate vocabularies, we cannot learn English well. In the bottom-up model, listening comprehension is believed to start with sound and meaning recognition.(Wang 143) Unfamiliar word or sound will increase the difficulty of listening comprehension.

In junior school, students often learn a word by spelling it letter by letter or memorize its related Chinese meaning. They can write the word correctly on the paper, but they cannot know the meaning of the word in the context. Memorizing words is quite difficult for them. Even if they can remember a word immediately by mechanical repetitions, they also forget it quickly. So lacking of vocabularies is an important cause of problems in listening comprehension. If a listening text has several unfamiliar words, they will not be able to understand the whole text completely or this will cause frustration or misunderstanding. Listening comprehension is a complicated process and students need to recognize each word in a very short time to make sense of the speaker’s intention. If they do not master amounts of vocabularies, they will fail to understand the meaning of speaker’s utterance which will cause communication breakdown.

4.2 Poor pronunciation

According to Anderson, listening comprehension includes three stages:perception, parsing and utilization. In the perception stage, the listener needs to encode the acoustic message. During this stage, sounds are retained in echoic memory, so attention of the listeners should be closely paid on acoustic input.(Xu 147) In the parsing stage, the correct pronunciation and meaning of the word need to be recognized in the listener’s mind. If the listener has poor pronunciation, difficulties in recognizing words will be increased.

In China, most junior school students’ pronunciation of English is not good. They cannot pronounce the word exactly, so they cannot recognize the word while listening to the text. Their poor listening skill results from their weak abilities of distinguishing pronunciations. So the practice of pronunciation cannot be neglected. The most important problem of junior school students is that they cannot recognize the sound quickly. This can be stated as the following.

First, they cannot recognize the words they have learned. It’s easy for students to understand words while reading. But when they receive the same word through ears, they cannot recognize the meaning immediately. This is because students usually learn vocabularies through reading. In junior school, it is common that students have good reading abilities while their listening comprehension is poor. This is because they seldom listen to original listening materials and there is a lack of environment to practice listening which causes poor pronunciation of students.

Second, most of them do not master the rules of pronunciation. In English, there are so many complicated pronunciation phenomena, such as assimilation, liaison, plosives, fricatives, glides and so on. For example, when we listen to English text, most of us cannot hear the article word clearly because it is always pronounced lightly. The phenomenon of liaison is a very complicated rule that most EFL students cannot master well in a very short time. There is no shortcut for students to master these rules but to practice.

4.3 Lack of grammatical knowledge

From the course of linguistics, we know that syntax refers to the study of rules that govern grammatically permissible sentences in languages. If students lack related grammar knowledge, they will not analyze the structures of sentences exactly and then they will find it quite difficult to understand the sentences or the whole text. Sometimes the listener may misunderstand the speaker’s utterance because of analyzing the sentence structure incorrectly which causes communication breakdown.

Listening is more difficult than other skills. It requires students to have a very good command of grammatical knowledge so that they can quickly analyze and understand the sentence and keep pace with the speakers or listening materials. Since students are not very familiar with the grammar, they can figure out the simple sentences but they have difficulty in analyzing complicated sentences immediately. Lacking of grammatical knowledge directly influences the listening comprehension.

4.4 Lack of background information

Background information is something that is relevant to the topic. It is quite important during listening comprehension. We have already talked about the bottom-up model before. Here top-down model is principally discussed. In the top-down model, listening for the main idea of the text or the article are emphasized. It requires that listeners should know some background information of the topic. Listening comprehension involves something that listeners have known about the text. From this point, the listeners can understand the text or the article better if they have known some background information, such as the knowledge about the speaker, the topic, the situation and the purpose of the communication.

Lacking background information also causes cross-cultural pragmatic failure. The American famous linguist has said: “Social life not only influences the external language performance but also influences the internal language competence.” People from different countries may have completely opposite comprehension of one thing. For example, in China, we often use the sentence “Have you had your lunch” to greet people whom we are familiar with. However, it is an inappropriate way to greet English people at lunch time. Also, speakers in different countries differ in the way of starting a conversation. At daily life, we often talk about some private questions at the beginning of the communication. On the contrary, the English speakers avoid asking private questions. They usually begin the conversation by talking about non-personal topics such as the weather. Asking the English speaker about his age or marital status is a typical case of pragmatic failure.

In China, many junior school students fail to understand the speaker’s utterance or listening materials because they are not familiar with this topic. Different countries have different cultures. Lacking background information may cause frustration in listening comprehension. Therefore, in order to improve listening comprehension, students need to know the society and culture of the target language as much as possible. All of us may have such feeling that there are no new words but we fail to understand the text correctly. This indicates that having amounts of words is not enough and we need to use much background information to help us understand the communication or text.

4.5 Psychological factors

The listener’s emotion or attitude plays a great role during listening. The bad mood has a bad effect on listening comprehension. When listening to English text, most students may become quite nervous. In most situations, when students meet a new word during listening, they may feel that they cannot understand the following parts of the text and become quite nervous. As a result, they cannot focus their attention on the listening materials. This will impede their development of listening skill.

In junior school, most students can do well in exams and read the passage confidently. However, when they are asked to listen to the English material or talk with somebody in English, they cannot hear the listening materials or others clearly and express their ideas fluently or even may cause a communication breakdown. The reason for such phenomenon is that students’ psychological quality is poor and they often feel nervous when listening to English materials.

4.6 Bad habits in listening

According to Zhang’s investigation, 75.3% of the students have some incorrect attitude towards listening comprehension:(1) They hope to understand every individual word of the text; (2) They always try to translate each sentence into Chinese. And when they come across new words in listening, many of them may feel upset and nervous. Only a few students can guess the new words from the context.(Zhang 9) There is little possibility that the EFL learners can understand every individual sound of the listening material or the speaker’s utterance. Usually, If the listener meets an unfamiliar word, he may spend much time thinking about its meaning and ignore the following parts which causes a failure in listening comprehension.

5. Resolution Strategies

Constructivism, proposed at the end of 1980s, is an important learning theory. It suggests that learners’ knowledge is constructed by themselves through their interaction with the environment and students are the center of the class. Teachers should not pour knowledge into students’ mind directly. Thus, teachers ought to change their traditional ideas about teaching and apply some more useful methods in English teaching. In junior school, problems of listening comprehension commonly exist. Students have poor listening comprehension due to the lack of vocabulary and background information, poor pronunciation, bad habits in listening and so on. Such causes have been researched a lot and effectively alleviated. But more studies should be carried out to find more realistic and useful approaches to improving students’ listening skill. The following parts are some useful strategies for these problems.

5.1 Enlarge students’ vocabularies

As we have mentioned before, vocabulary is the basis for developing a good listening skill. There are many vocabularies in English. But not all words are useful in our daily communication. So as an English teacher, we need to tell students which words are commonly used in communication and which words are only needed to be recognized while in reading or listening but are needed not to pay more attention to.

In traditional pedagogy, teachers are always knowledge transmitters who pour the knowledge they have known into students’ minds. Students always memorize the words mechanically. This way is improper and does harm to students’ improvement of listening comprehension. They will lose the interests in learning English. According to lexical cohesion theory proposed by Halliday, listening materials are presented in the form of discourse. He classified vocabulary into two types: collocation and reiteration. Vocabularies like synonym, antonym etc are all crucial in listening. For example, students can figure out new words through other familiar words in the text. Thus, teachers should tell students some useful strategies to learn new words, such as reviewing regularly, organizing vocabulary effectively, guessing meaning from context and so on. For example, some approaches like labeling, word bingo, word associations, describing and drawing are all effective to help students consolidate words. These ways will help students remember new words easier. When students have adequate words, their listening abilities will be improved greatly.

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