Factors Affecting Senior High School Students’ English Listening Comprehension and Some Solut.doc

毕业论文(设计)Factors Affecting Senior High School Students English Listening Comprehension and Some Solutions1. Introduction12. Characteristics of listening comprehension22.1 Teaching listening is different from teaching reading22.2 Listening processes33. Listening problems in Senior High School43.1 The sounds53.1.1 Pronunciation and reading speed63.1.2 Liaison73.2 The vocabulary73.3 The slow processing speed83.4 The cultural background knowledge and psychological factors93.4.1 The cultural background knowledge93.4.2 The psychological factors104. Solutions to listening problems in Senior High School104.1 Solution to problems caused by sounds114.2 Solution to problems caused by vocabulary124.3 Solution to problems caused by slow processing speed144.4 Solution to problems caused by cultural background knowledge and psychological factors154.4.1 Enlarge the knowledge about cultural background154.4.2 Overcome the barriers caused by psychological factors164.4.2.1 Choose listening materials174.4.2.2 Eliminate psychological obstacles and cut down anxiety174.4.2.3 Raise students confidence and bring every active factor into playing185. Conclusion18References201. Introduction Modern language teaching theory highly emphasizes the effect of “listening” on the learning and the use of language. The teaching of English listening isnt only a teaching of language, also a training of ability. In the four skills: listening, speaking, reading and writing, listening is the basic among them. It isnt the only main way of acquiring language information, but the base of improving other skills. Many Chinese students regard the listening test as the most difficult part of a whole test. As for the students who are weak in English, they will find that they almost make no progress, no matter how hard they work on listening. Whats worse, they will even lose interest in English. And the barriers that Senior High School students meet in listening are various, for example, the poor input in English sounds, vocabulary slow processing speed and the lack of knowledge of cultural background. This paper intends to make a solution to enhance students listening abilities.How Senior High School Students can improve their listening and get good marks in the exam becomes the subject that teachers care. To achieve this subject requires teachers to find out what factors influence listening comprehension. And in this paper we will read what kind of solutions are suitable for improving Senior High School Students listening comprehension. 2. Characteristics of listening comprehension Listening is the ability to identify and understand what others are saying. Rost (1994:141-142) points out, listening is vital in the language classroom because it provides input for the learner. And it is true that there is a great variety of situation where we need to listen to English. It is important to understand the characteristics or processes behind these listening situation so that teachers can find appropriate solutions to help students to develop effective habits and strategies.2.1 Teaching listening is different from teaching reading Teaching listening is quite different from teaching reading, though listening and reading both belong to receptive skills. In reading, students connect the meaning with the printed words while in listening, they connect the meaning with sounds. They can refer back if they want to while they do reading, but they can not do so, in many cases, in listening because the sounds disappear very quickly and they do not have the slightest opportunity to go back.This partly accounts for the fact that for Senior High School students who have seldom been exposed to English spoken language, a passage can be understood very well when it is read, but its meaning can be hardly figured out when it is heard. It is certain that if the complexity of the material concerned learning is the same, listening tends to be more difficult. It can be said that to teach listening effectively is not very easy. 2.2 Listening processesTo help student to improve the English listening comprehension, we need first to understand what happens when we listen. Mary Underwood(1989) points out that the listening process consists of three stages.At the first stage, the sounds go into a sensory store, often called the echoic memory, and are organized into meaningful units, according to the knowledge of the language the listener already has.At the second stage, words or groups of words are checked and compared with information already held in the long term memory and the meaning is extracted from them.At the third stage, after the listener has constructed a meaning from the utterance (which may or may not be the meaning that was intended by the speaker), he or she might transfer the information to the long term memory for later use. It seems that generally a listener who wants to do these records the message and stores it in the long term memory in a reduced form. The problem is that each of the three stages happens within a few seconds. Thus the Senior High School students may be unable to process the incoming stream fast enough and will fail to extract meaning from what they have heard.At present, the process based on the receiving of acoustic signals is referred to as “bottom-up” processing while the process based on the application of background knowledge and contextual information to make predictions is known as “top-down” processing. The success in listening comprehension depends on the interaction of these two processes. Neither can be lacking. 3. Listening problems in Senior High SchoolTo help students to enhance the English listening ability, teachers need also to know their level and identify where their problems lie in listening.“If you are trying to teach somebody something, you need to have a clear idea of what it is you are trying to teach. This is as true of teaching listening comprehension in foreign language as it is of teaching architectural students how to draw the plans and elevations of buildings” (Brown, 1990).So to know the students level and identify where their problems lie is the prerequisite for helping students to improve their listening ability.The problems facing Senior High School students in their listening are found to be at different hierarchies of a listening test. Some appear in “bottom-up” processing and others arise in “top-down” processing. After they have been exposed to listening tests, some of their problems may become less serious and they more or less have obtained the ability to adjust to the English native speakers accents on the tape. However, throughout the three years in Senior High School, they have problems of understanding speech during longer discourse. In listening to an extended passage or dialogue, they tend to treat each sentence in isolation and hence fail to make an inference which needs to be drawn from the context. Very often they fail to distinguish the topic sentence from the development details and as a result they are uncertain about the main idea of the listening text they have heard. Also, vocabulary and the long and complicated sentence structure which is entirely different from that of their mother tongue present obstacles for them in understanding the listening text. Problems related to students such as slow processing speed and nervousness are salient during the beginning of listening training. If those students who have such problems are not able to build up confidence and practice listening to overcome them, they may remain throughout the whole Senior High School. Some of their problems reflected in doing listening comprehension in class are related to the following aspects. 3.1 The soundsMany students never spoke to native English speaker before they entered the Senior High School. Under such conditions, when they begin to listen, they find that the English words they have heard from the tape-record sound strange and different from the clearly pronounced by their teachers in Junior High Schools. As for the students who are weak in English, they will find that they almost make no progress, no matter how hard they work on listening. Whats worse, they will even lose interest in English. And if a teacher just trains students based on the multiple-choice, obviously, it is not enough, whether the students use it in the classroom or in the real talk with others. Listening comprehension is viewed theoretically as an active process in which individual listeners focus on selected aspects of aural input, construct meaning from passages, and relate what they hear to existing knowledge.Little knowledge do students have about the fact that the pronunciation of words undergoes changes in the stream of speech. As a result, they tend to fail to understand spoken English. This problem is quite typical for Senior High School students. Examples of failure to understand can be found in students listening in class. The failures to understand are usually caused by pronunciation and reading speed. They tend to block students comprehension and often completely confuse them.3.1.1 Pronunciation and reading speedEven at the beginning of language learning some students are not sure of the proper pronunciation of each word. If things go on like this, especially of those words which have similar pronunciation, the students would find its very difficult to distinguish. Here are some commonly used words that have similar or even the same pronunciation. e.g. sheep ship /i:p /-/ip /house horse /haus /-/h:s / bad bed /bd /-/ bed /much march / mt/-/ m:t/ mouth mouse / mau /-/ maus / quite quiet / kwait /-/ kwait / Once hearing such words above, some of the students feel puzzled. Most important of all, we should make it clear-what are these words and their pronunciation？More attention should be paid to the pronunciation. Various kinds of changes in speaking speed would cause a series of problems.3.1.2 Liaison Liaison is another feature that students tend to fail to notice in their listening and often cause problems in understanding. Take the following as an example.Listening text:Hello, hello. My names Joe Monroe, and I am calling from Indiana. Can I speak to Diana, please? Am I speaking to Dinna?Oh, no, no, no. Im not Diana. I think that youve got the wrong number, my friend. Youve dialed a hotel in Montana.Directions: listen to the song “wrong number” carefully.Fill in the blanks with the words in the song.It is usually difficult for students to work out the words “hotel in the last blank. The reason is that the last sound /l/ in the word “hotel” and the first sound /l/ in the word “in” undergo a case of liaison. What students actually heard is /h u telin/, which perplexes them so much that they fail to figure out the exact word. When it is pronounced in isolation, it is immediately understood with no difficulty at all.3.2 The vocabularyVocabulary is the most detailed part of language knowledge. A large number of vocabularies will help students to do well in listening comprehension and master the listening materials quickly. In order to know others idea and express oneself, thousands of words and short phrases are very necessary.It can not be doubted that the lack of the necessary amount of vocabulary will lead listening comprehension to failure. Inability to process the sounds into meaningful words at the same time they are being perceived will have the same result. One student said, “Once I heard a word rob in a passage. I thought I had come across it before, but just could not remember its meaning right away. What I did next was keeping on working out the meaning of the word and could no longer concentrate my attention on the incoming information. As a result, nothing of the rest of the passage was comprehended.” This is true of many other students if they are confronted with the same situation. As a matter of fact, this is a bad habit, which needs to be eliminated. “Students need to develop the skill of keeping up with the speaker (even being ahead of the speaker) even this means letting go parts which they failed sort out” (Mary Underwood ,1989).3.3 The slow processing speedMany students feel that the English speaks so fast that they cant keep up. They hardly have time to understand what they heard when the incoming chunk of the language arrives or they simply have no time to do so. As a result, they struggle to keep up with the speaker and often they lose the battle if they make no concessions and tolerate no vagueness. The situation is even worse for those who try to understand sentences by translating them one after another, but not pass on them in a scene or a picture and that has greatly affected their reaction speed, understanding and memorization. As we know, Chinese sentence structure and word order are greatly different from those of English. So comprehending English on the base of Chinese can be both slow and easily cause misunderstanding. Whats more, to concentrate energy on translation，students have only limited time to comprehend the listening materials without any implied meanings of them. Especially for a long and complicated sentence, the translation is much more difficult, for example, “He had hardly had time to settle down when he sold the house and left the country”. In this sentence students may look for a Chinese sentence that equals：“hardlywhen”，then think of its tense, and then understand its meaning. So the speed would be much slower and would easily make misunderstanding. In this situation, they are bound to fail in listening comprehension.3.4 The cultural background knowledge and psychological factors3.4.1 The cultural background knowledgeLanguage is the appearance of culture. Students who want to learn English listening well must have certain knowledge about history and cultures even know something about their local conditions and customs, their living style and habits. For lacking of such knowledge, some students have difficulties in listening. For example, “Thanksgiving”, “April Fool” often appear in some listening materials. If students have little knowledge about these, they will feel puzzled. For instance, the English usually greet each other by talking about the weather but our Chinese are in a different matter. In most time，Chinese would like to ask others,“Whats your wifes job？and her age?” and the partners would never mind. But the English are not likely to talk about their own privacy such as age, salary and so on. Asking about such things is usually thought to be uncultured.3.4.2 The psychological factorsPeople become aware of psychological factors nowadays. Learners are the key internal factors. The difference of their psychological and emotion factors have great influence on listening comprehension achievements.In Senior High School, the affective factors that play a negative role in strategy acquisition include anxiety, distress, frustration, and resistance. For example, learner felt depressed when she failed to comprehend: “I felt so depressed because I was totally lost in the exam.” She related the comprehension failure to the failure of the listening strategies applied: “The strategies I learned were not helping me enough.” Though some psychological problems can be overcome by the self-monitoring strategy, some learners experienced similar affective influence when a self-monitoring strategy was not functioning well: “I couldnt get the details out of the text even though I felt I had self-monitored myself .” The frustration led thoughts of giving up the listening task or the target strategy.4. Solutions to listening problems in Senior High SchoolAs mentioned above, what brings about success in listening comprehension is the interaction of “bottom-up” and “top-down” processes.In listening comprehension, native listeners rely very heavily on “top-down” processing since it is found that they never make errors that are not consistent with the syntax and meaning of the utterance. In listening comprehension, they use their language knowledge and other available or previously acquired information to predict or anticipate what will be said, to deduce or recognize words on the basis of absent or incomplete indicators, to use their knowledge of the sound patterns of the language. However, as for the foreign language learner who begins to learn to listen, “bottom-up” processing is the foundation. Without this foundation, “top-down” alone will not work. Many things that the native speaker acquires so automatically and unconsciously need to be learned consciously for the foreign learner. The foreign learner needs also to be trained to overcome difficulties in order to acquire an intermediate level of competence stated in the Senior High School English Syllabus. In helping students lay down this foundation, teachers should, at the same time, help them build up background knowledge to do “top-down” processing, especially at a more advanced stage of listening when the listening material becomes extended. 4.1 Solution to problems caused by soundsIt has mentioned that most Senior High School students had been exposed to spoken English since they had learned English. Therefore they tend to be insensitive to features of spoken features of spoken English such as liaison, loss of explosion, assimilation, etc. these features of spoken English make students feel that they have never heard English spoken like this, especially if their former teachers pronunciation was not so standard. If this problem is not solved, in listening class they will probably flounder in a stream of the acoustic blur that hits their ears and their experience is bound to be quit