1. Introduction

English is one of the most common languages in the world, and people from different countries can communicate with each other in English in order to establish business relations at home and abroad or disseminate national advanced culture to the world. Therefore, increasing number of parents and teachers attach much importance to English study. English study consists of four parts, including listening, speaking, reading, writing, and among all these parts English listening comprehension plays a critical role. People with good listening comprehension can not only understand others better in the communication process but also talk easily with each other and apply new knowledge they have acquired. Because of the importance of listening comprehension, people are supposed to pay much attention to improve it. According to the previous researches, there are many factors which influence English listening comprehension, for instance, vocabulary, attitude, accent and so on. This research will mainly focus on the effects of accents and difficulties on English listening comprehension.

1.1 Need for the study

As we all know, English listening comprehension plays an important role not only in our study but also in our work. As to study, good listening comprehension will be beneficial to our performance; as to work, it will do good to enhance our work efficiency and improve our ability to communicate with our foreign customers. In view of its importance, many studies about listening comprehension have been carried out.

In the past several decades, a lot of studies have been conducted on accents or difficulty levels and listening comprehension, and many of them are on the relationship between accent sensitivity and story comprehension (Bauker, 2015) or word recognition (Ji, 2014), but few studies have been carried out to research the effects of accents on English listening comprehension. Especially, many experiments of the previous research haven#8217;t provided us with clear results because of many inevitable factors. In addition, the participants of many studies are international students. Therefore, there are few findings yield in analyzing the effects of foreign accents on English comprehension, not to mention the interaction of accents and difficulties on listening comprehension.

1.2 Research purpose

The present study intends to analyze the effects of Chinese and British accents on English listening comprehension. The motivation for this research is to answer the question: First of all, is there any significant effect of accents on English listening comprehension; What#8217;s more, is there any significant effect of difficulty levels on English listening comprehension; In addition, is there any significant interaction between different difficulty levels and accents in terms of English listening comprehension

Hopefully, the findings of the present study are of value to EFL learners and teachers in the respect of English listening comprehension in China by offering them some useful suggestions.