A Review of Learner Problems in Listening Comprehension Their Implications for Listening Tea.doc

毕业论文(设计)Acknowledgements I would like to express my heartfelt thanks to those who gave me great support and help in my dissertation. The most special acknowledgement is shown to my supervisor Mr. Luo Chengyu, whose careful reading and suggestions have been invaluable to me throughout my thesis writing. Im greatly indebted to him for his earnest and strict supervision and his useful advice. Thank him for his patience and meticulousness in correcting mistakes in my dissertation. Without his encouragement and support, this work would not have been possible. I am also grateful to the teachers in my senior high school who have gave me many suggestions to design a questionnaire though I have not use it in this thesis. In particular, I also appreciate my roommate Meave Tan who corrected my abstract carefully. Thanks my roommates for their help me to hand in the thesis and give me notice when I was not in the school.AbstractListening comprehension is one of the important language skills. Learners encounter many difficulties in the listening comprehension. As for such phenomenon, I review the study of Goh (1999) and the questionnaire of Liao Yan (2007), which are both about the learners listening comprehension problems. In Gohs article, he pointed out 10 listening comprehension problems which occurred during the cognitive processing phases of perception, parsing and utilization. In Liao Yans thesis, she designed a questionnaire about students listening comprehension problems in the rural high schools of Nanning, the capital of Guangxi Zhang Autonomous Region. Then she also pointed out 10 common listening problems. Among the problems pointed by Goh (1999) and Liao Yan (2007), the common ones are: students cannot recognize the words they have learned; they quickly forget what they heard; they understand the words but not the intend meaning; they cannot get the key idea of the content and are not familiar with the content of the listening material refer to; they feel the content of the material is dull and so on.Some enlightenment of listening teaching was given by these common listening problems and their possible reasons proposed by Goh (1999) and Liao Yan (2007). According to such enlightenment, I give some implications for listening teaching from 3 parts: the lack of vocabulary, the limitation of background knowledge and the negative affective factors. Among the three parts, I mainly discuss the listening comprehension problems caused by the lack of vocabulary and support some implications about enlarging vocabulary, the memory of vocabulary, the prediction and the way to get key words of sentences and message.Key Words: listening listening difficulties implications 摘 要听力理解是英语学习技能中的一个重要组成部分。学生在听力理解过程中遇到许多困难。针对这一现象，本文回顾了Goh（1999）和廖燕(2007)关于学生听力问题的研究调查。在Goh的文章中，他提出学生在感知，分析，应用三个认知过程中常遇到的10个问题。在廖燕的文章中，她通过对广西壮族自治区高中生在听力学习中遇到问题的问卷调查后也提出了学生常见的10个听力问题。在Goh和廖燕提出的听力问题中，其中常见的问题有：学生在听力过程中不能再认学过的单词；快速遗忘所听到的内容；理解所听到单词的意思但不是其确切含义；不能抓住听力材料的主要意思；不熟悉听力材料的内容等。Goh和廖燕提出学生常见的听力问题及其可能存在的原因对我在听力教学上有所启迪。根据这些启发，我从词汇不足，缺乏背景知识和受负面情感影响三方面提出些听力教学建议。在这三方面中，我重点论述了由词汇不足引起的听力问题，并从扩大词汇，词汇的记忆，预测能力和如何抓住句子或文章的关键词来给出教学建议。关键词：听力 听力问题 听力教学建议ContentsAcknowledgements.iAbstract(English).iiAbstract(Chinese).ivContents. v1 Introduction.12 Theoretical background .3 2.1 The nature of listening. .32.2 The process of listening comprehension.4 2.3 Factors that affect listening comprehension.63 Review of Goh (1999) & Liao Yan (2007) .7 3.1 Review of Goh.7 3.1.1 A cognitive Framework.83.1.2 The study.93.2 A review of Liao Yan (2007).14 4 Implications for teaching listening comprehension.164.1 Implications for enlarging vocabulary .164.2 Implications for enlarge background knowledge.214.3 Implications for avoiding negative affective factors.215 Conclusion.23References.2526 A Review of Learner Problems in Listening Comprehension & Their Implications for Listening Teaching1. Introduction Under the New Curriculum Criteria (NCC), the goal of learning English for student in senior high school in China is to communicate with others in it. So the NCC have high requirement for English learning, especially in listening comprehension for it plays an important role in English learning. Listening comprehension as a high interactive skill plays an importance role in the process of language learning and facilitates the development of other language skills. Listening is a fundamental language skill that typically develops faster than speaking and that often influences the development of reading and writing ability in the new language (Scarella and Offord, 1992). Rost (1994) pointed out that listening is vital in the language classroom because it provides input for the learners. Beside, of the total time devoted to communicating, 45% is spent listening, 30% speaking, 16% reading, and 9% writing (Duker, 1971; Feyten, 1991) which indicates the effective listening comprehension is one of the guarantees to achieve successful communication. Therefore, in order to achieve successful communication and improve student listening comprehension, the current criteria for student in the senior high school under the NCC is higher than before. It is that: they should be able to understand the teachers oral English in the classes, understand the conversation about the daily life in slow speed, grasp the whole meaning of a simple paragraph with few new words, and understand the news on the radio, television and other videos whose content is related with the proficiency of the students. However, during the teaching practice in a senior high school, I found though many students can get a good mark in English test, not all of them can perform well in listening comprehension. They meet listening problems and consider that listening is the most difficult in English learning. Listening comprehension has become an obstacle of language learning. Many teachers and scholars in China have pay attention to the listening comprehension problems faced by the learners, and try to find their likely reasons and solutions. But most of their results are vague. They have not given detailed suggestion for teaching in a specific perspective. So in this thesis I review Gohs study (1999) and Liao Yans investigations (2007) to point out the main problems faced by the students and highlight some their possible reasons. Then I give some implications for teaching, hoping to improve the learners English listening comprehension. The paper consists of 5 parts: Part I is a brief introduction of the importance of listening comprehension in language learning, the current requirement of NCC with regard to listening, the purpose and structure of this thesis. Part II introduces the theory on which this thesis is based, introducing the nature of listening, the process of listening comprehension, factors that affect listening comprehension. Part III reviews the Gohs study (1999) and Liao Yans (2007) investigation and points out the common problems faced by the students and their possible reasons. Part IV gives some implications for teaching according to Gohs and Liao Yans suggestion. Part VI is a conclusion, summarizing what has been discussed and hoping further research has done to study the students listening comprehension problems and give more solutions for both teaching and learning. 2. Theoretical Background When we study what the listening comprehension problems faced the students and how to conduct a successful listening first we must know the nature of listening, the process of listening comprehension and the factors that affect listening comprehension. 2.1 The nature of listening Larry Vandergrift (1997) holds the view that “listening comprehension is anything but a passive activity. It is a complex, active process in which the listener must discriminate sound, understand vocabulary and in all of the above, and interpret it within the immediate as well as the large social-cultural context of the utterance.”Brown (1990) thinks that “listeners are not simply passive processors who undertake automatic signal recognition exercises as acoustic signals are fed into them and so construct meaning.” He explains, “When listening, the listeners are active searchers for meaning. The active listeners will use all relevant background knowledgeknowledge of the physical context of the utterance (the immediate surroundings, the time of lay, etc.), knowledge of the speaker (gender, age, known opinions), knowledge of the topic (and what the speaker is likely to know about it, or feel about it), etc. Armed with this active knowledge, the listener monitors the incoming acoustic signal, which will simultaneously shape and confirm his expectations.” (Brown, 1990) John Morley (1991) defines listening as “everything impinges on the human processing which mediates between sound and construction of meaning.” She thinks “everything that impinges” includes the important dimension of the affective information, which is an integral part of real-world communication.” The above definitions confirm that listening is an active and conscious process rather than a straightforward of sound to meaning as it was assumed. In the process of listening, listeners should understand a speakers accent or pronunciation, his grammar and his vocabulary, and related what they hear to their existing knowledge to grasp the meaning.2.2 The process of listening comprehension Peterson (1991) thinks that “comprehension of a message is essentially the internal production of that message. At first, raw speech as acoustic data enters the sensory store. Then it is taken into short-term memory. At last, the information must be analyzed into syntactic constituents, converted into semantic units (propositions) in the long-term memory store.”Anderson (1995) has proposed a cognitive framework of language comprehension in 1995. This three phase model proposes that comprehension consists of perception, parsing and utilization. Perception involves attending to and recognizing an input. In listening comprehension, sound patterns are translated into words in working memory. Parsing means mentally divide the sound patterns into units of meaning. Utilization refers to the disposition of the parsed mental representation: storing in long-term memory if it is a learning task, giving an answer if it is a question, asking a question if it is not comprehended, and so forth. Perception, parsing and utilization represent different levels of processing, with perception being the lowest. All the three phases are interrelated and recursive and can happen concurrently during a single listening event.Clark, H and E. Clark (1997) claims that listening comprehension involves the following four steps:(1) The listener takes in raw speech and holds an image of it in short-term memory. (2) An attempt is made to organize what was heard into constituents, identifying their content and function. (3) As constituents are identified, they are used to construct propositions, grouping the propositions together to form a coherent message.(4) Once the listener has identified and reconstructed the propositional meanings, these are held in long-term memory, and the form in which the message was originally received is deleted. Based on cognition, there are two views that illustrated the procedure of listening comprehension: bottom-up and top-down processing. The “bottom-up” processing model assumes that listening is a process of decoding the sounds, from the smallest meaningful units (or phonemes) to words in grammatical relationships to complete texts (Nunan, 2001). “Bottom-up” processing mainly focuses on sounds, words, intonations, and grammatical structures.In the “top-down” processing, the listener makes use of background knowledge, knowledge of the text structure and knowledge of the world to assist in the interpretation of discourse (Nuanan, 2001). “Top-down” processing is more concerned with the activation of schemata, with deriving meaning, with global understanding, and with the interpretation of a text (Brown, 2001). L 2 listening does indeed involve some “bottom-up” processing, but at the same time it requires substantial amounts of “top-down” processing in which the meaning is inferred from broad contextual clues and background knowledge (Richards, 1983). To sum up, the process of listening comprehension is complex. It involves with listeners linguistic knowledge, background knowledge and his different models of cognitive processing, such as the bottom-up and top-down processing.2.3 Factors that affect listening comprehension There are many factors that affect listening comprehension. Wang Mingyu and Jia Liangyu (1999) point out: “the factors that affect listening comprehension mainly come from three sources: the listening material, the speaker, the listener.” The listening material aspect includes the language and the content, different kinds of material forms, intonation, pause, hesitation and the social status. The aspects of speakers are the speed of speech, pause, hesitation of speakers, the quality of their pronunciation and the social role of speakers. The aspects of learners that affect the listening comprehension are the language proficiency, the background knowledge and the psychology (Wang Mingyu & Jia Liangyu, 1999: 221). According to Penny Ur (2000), sounds, intonation and stress, redundancy and noise, prediction, colloquial vocabulary, fatigue, different accents, and so on may be some of the main potential problems that affect listening comprehension. Waston ( 1973, see Nunan, 2001, 210) find out factors internal to the learner such as attentiveness, motivation, interest and knowledge of the topic can have a marked bearing on listening success.3 Review of Goh (1999) & Liao Yan (2007) Listening comprehension should be a major area of concern to teachers and students of a second or foreign language (L2), for it plays an important role in language learning. Research has been done to find out the reasons for learners problems and solutions. In this section, I review the study of Goh (1999) and Liao Yans investigation (2007) in a cognitive perspective on language learners listening comprehension problems.3.1 Review of Goh (1999) In Gohs study (1999), he offered a cognitive perspective on the comprehension problems of second language listeners. He identified real-time listening difficulties faced by a group of English as a second language (ESL) learners and examined these difficulties within the three-phase model of language comprehension proposed by Anderson (1995). Data were elicited from learners self-reports through the procedures of learner diaries, small group interviews and immediate retrospective verbalisations. His analysis showed 10 problems which occurred during the cognitive processing phases of perception, parsing and utilisation. Goh also did a comparison of two groups of learners with different listening abilities showing some similarities in the difficulties experienced, but low ability listeners had more problems with low-level processing. Finally, Goh offered some practical suggestions for helping learners become better listeners. There is detail review as follow. 3.1.1 A cognitive framework The theoretical background of Gohs study (1999) is a cognitive framework of language comprehension proposed by Anderson (1995). This three-phase model proposes that comprehension consists of perception, parsing and utilisation (see Anderson, 1995: 379). Perceptual processing is the encoding of the acoustic or written message. In listening, this involves segmenting phonemes from the continuous speech stream (see Anderson, 1995: 37). During this phase in listening, an individual attends closely to input and the sounds are retained in echoic memory. During parsing, words are transformed into a mental representation of the combined meaning of these words. This occurs when an utterance is segmented according to syntactic structures or cues to meaning. These segments are then recombined to generate a meaningful representation of the original sequence. This mental representation is related to existing knowledge and stored in long-term memory as propositions or schemata during the third phase, utilisation. At this stage the listener may draw different types of inferences to complete the interpretation and make it more personally meaningful, or use the mental representation to respond to the speaker. Perception, parsing and utilisation represent different levels of processing, with perception being the lowest. All three phases are interrelated and recursive and can happen concurrently during a single listening event. They are by necessity partially ordered in time; however, they also partly overlap. Listeners can be making inferences from the first part of a sentence while they are already perceiving a later part (see Anderson, 1995: 379). Although Andersons (1995) three-phase model is based on first language (L1) comprehension, it is no less relevant to an understanding of second language comprehension (L2). We have good reasons to believe that there are many similarities between L1 and L2 comprehension. A cognitive framework is useful for understanding learners listening difficulties as it pinpoints those place