英语听力理解障碍的消除策略.doc

河南科技学院新科学院
2014届本科毕业论文

On Elimination Strategies of English Listening Comprehension Barriers
英语听力理解障碍的消除策略

学生姓名：
所在系别：____外国语言文学系
所学专业：英语
导师姓名：
朱 凤 莉(助教)
完成时间： 2014年4月

On Elimination strategies of English Listening Comprehension Barriers

Cao Errui

Xinke College of Henan Institute of Science and Technology
April, 2014

Contents

Acknowledgements i
Abstract ii
摘 要 iii
I. Introduction 1
II. The Importance of English Listening 1
III. The Embodiments of English Listening Barriers 3
3.1 The Embodiments of English Listening Comprehension Barriers 3
3.1.1 The lack in the Basic Knowledge 3
3.1.2 The lack Listening Training and the Cultivation of Students’ Listening Ability 4
3.2 Analysis of English Listening Comprehension Barriers 5
3.2.1 Basic Knowledge of Language 6
3.2.2 Basic Knowledge of Non-Language 7
IV. The Elimination Strategies of English Listening Comprehension Barriers 9
4.1 Emphasizing Basic Knowledge 9
4.2 To Cultivate Students’ Listening Comprehension Skills and Good Habit of Listening 11
4.3 To Combining Listening Comprehension Training with Daily Teaching 12
4.4 To Cultivating Good Psychological Quantity of Students 13
V. Conclusion 14
Bibliography 15

Acknowledgements

I owe a great debt of gratitude to those who helped me get through the difficult process of pursuing the undergraduate degree. First and foremost, I would like to express my sincerely appreciation to supervisor Zhu Feng Li, because of her guidance and patience in accomplishing this paper. Not only did she spend much effort in reading every draft of the paper, but also she gave me insightful comments which contributed to the accuracy and clarity of the contents. Without her encouragement and supervision, it must be impossible for me to complete this thesis. I am genuinely grateful for what she has done for me.
In addition, I would like to give my sincere thanks to my classmates: Zhang Lin, Chen Can, Liu Ying Hui, Zhao Ying Ying, etc. Especially when I felt upset and worried they accompanied me timely so that I felt not so lonely. And by their encouragement, I would be able to accomplish my task in the graduate school.
Last but not least, I want to express my profound gratitude to my roommates: Pan Wen Hui, Yang Xiao Fang, Zhu Qin Li and so on, for their understanding and warm support during the whole process of my graduate study. They always do me a favor specially meeting troubles. Because of their unconditional love and considerable encouragement, I am full of confidence and courage in my study.

Abstract

Listening, as one of the important channels of language input, is the foundation of cultivating learners’ reading competence and writing competence. There is no doubt that English listening is also one important but difficult part in English teaching. It’s not only the main way of acquiring language information, but also the base of improving other skills. However, English as our second language, there are some embodiments of English listening comprehension barriers on some aspects. For example, some English learners feel that it is hard to hear clearly what the English speakers said, or the listeners would misunderstand information sometimes, which it doesn’t come to the effect that they want. Therefore, how to solve it? In the thesis, there lists some embodiments of English listening comprehension barriers, and makes a brief analysis, last but not least puts forward some strategies which aims to find that only by attaching great importance to cultivate good psychological quantity of students , cultivating students’ listening comprehension skills and good habit of listening, emphasizing on the teaching of language knowledge and so on, it can improve students’ English listening competences and levels, in addition, it would be helpful for teachers in English teaching.

Key words: English listening comprehension barriers;elimination strategies; listening teaching

摘 要

听力作为语言输入的一个重要通道，它是培养学习者读、写能力的基础。毋庸置疑，英语教学中，英语听力是重要却又困难的一部分，它不仅是获取语言信息的主要方式，而且是提高其它技能的基础。然而，英语作为我们的第二语言, 在某些方面存在些听力理解障碍的表现，例如，许多听者很难听清楚说话者究竟说了什么或者有时会误解一些信息。对此该如何解决呢？本文章列举了一些英语听力理解障碍表现并作简要分析，同时提出了一些策略，旨在通过重视培养学生良好的心理素质、听力技巧与好的听力习惯，及语言知识的传授等方面，从而提高提高学生英语听力能力和水平，并且对教师教学工作也会有一些帮助！

关键词：英语听力理解障碍; 消除策略; 听力教学

iii

I. Introduction

With the development of economy and culture, as well as the economy globalization, learning English has become an unstoppable trend. English, as our second language, plays an important role in our daily communication. Therefore, how to acquire it as soon as possible is our urgent problem at present. In recent years, the teachers and scholars have recognized the importance of teaching listening comprehension in classrooms, growing to understand the significant role it plays in language learning and communication. Listening comprehension, furthermore, is deemed as a highly integrative skill because it can facilitate the emergence of other language skills. As a result, an awareness and deployment of effective listening comprehension strategies can help students capitalize on the language input they are receiving” (Vandergrift, 1999, 170). Though it plays such an important role, the current teaching of listening faces a number of problems. Such as not pay much attention on it, lack practicing and exercises and show no interest in textbooks and so on. The exports and professionals have realized these problems and have made great effort to improve the situation. Moreover, most students think that their English listening comprehension can’t improved after a few years’ study. As for it, the intention of this thesis is to improve students’ English listening comprehensioncompetence and level, and teachers’English teaching skills. The reason that chose this topic is that by attaching great importance to cultivate good psychological quantity of students , cultivating students’ listening comprehension skills and good habit of listening, and emphasizing on the teaching of language knowledge, it can improve students’ English listening competences and levels, what’s more, it would be benefit for teachers in their English teaching in the future to some extent. That is the main contents and significance of the paper expressing. This thesis consists of five chapters. The important parts are chapter three and four. Chapter three mainly presents the embodiments of English listening comprehension barriers on two aspects and makes an analysis. As to chapter four is that the elimination strategies of English listening comprehension barriers which is mainly made up of four small parts. The last chapter is the conclusion, which summarize the embodiments of English listening comprehension barriers, address the limitation of the passage, and put forward the possible embodiments and elimination strategies for further.

II. The Importance of English Listening

The learners all envy a kind of person that do very well in listening, speaking, reading and writing, especially for students.Among all the abilities,listening is one of the most frequently used one. What’s more, listening is the foundation of communication and provides learners with “input” . Listening plays an important role in secondlanguage instruction for several reasons(Rost,1994):
First, listening provides comprehensible input for the learner which is essential for any learning to occur. Second, listeners need to interact with speakers to achieve understanding. Third, listening exercises help learners draw their attention to new forms (vocabulary, grammar, interaction patterns) in the language. Thus listening comprehension provides the right conditions for language acquisition and development of other language skills (Klashen,1995). Listening exercises, therefore, should be geared to develop learners' effective listening strategies and to overcome their listening barriers.
Klashen states that during the acquisition of a certain language, whether the learners are adults or juveniles, the most important part is listening, for listening is the basic part in daily communication (Carrel 1989:15-30). Therefore, English listening has received a wide publicity.
Over the last few decades, a great number of researches have emphasized on the essentialrole that listening plays in language acquisition. And listening comprehension skills have begun to receive much more systematic attention in language teaching classrooms (Anderson & Lynch, 1988;Courchene, et al., 1992; Underwood, 1989). Second language acquisition considered listening crucial to the development of a learner’s secondlanguage, particularly at the beginning stage of language development.English has become an international language used for international and intercultural communication among non-native speakers of English which outnumbered monolingual native speakers Crystal (English as a global language, Cambridge:CUP1997). With an advanced understanding of communicative competence Hymes(Sociolinguistics, Baltimore: Penguin Books,1972 : 269–293) and intelligible communication, language scholars contemporarily contend that explicit pronunciation is necessary in language curricula Celce-Murcia et al. Teachers and scholars have recognized the significant role it plays in language learning and communication. English, as our second language, which is important for learners to communicate with foreign people, has been becoming much popular among us.

III. The Embodiments of English Listening Barriers

When it comes to the embodiments of English listening comprehension barriers, the English learners always have a lot of words to say. Some may say: “I can’t understand what the speakers said, which makes me feel misunderstanding.” And others say: “I can’t follow the speed of the speakers, which gets me crazy. As well as, there is nothing in my mind when it deals with the foreign culture or backgrounds, for I lack this aspect.”

3.1 The Embodiments of English Listening Comprehension Barriers

Here are some specific embodiments of English listening comprehension barriers. Via these specific embodiments, the listeners are able to get to know the shortages of the English listening.In order to get over these barriers and improve their English listening, it would have some indicates.
3.1.1 The lack in the Basic Knowledge
As learners know, the whole process of listening is quite complicated. During the process, learners have to make use of every factor and aim that learned including: sociolinguistics, cognitive linguistics and the construction of the language. The characteristics of listening comprehension could be listed as follows:
(1) identifying words and gain the meaning of its related words; (2) comprehending the implication of the words and inferring the implication proceeded by its related words in order to achieve an obscure hierarchical arrangement of the passage; (3) gaining the meaning of every word in the discourse, comprehending the discourse through the relationship among sentences, getting the implication of the discourse by the help of context; (4) the comprehension of the discourse could be divided into two aspects: on the one hand, listeners could achieve their comprehension through partial information existing in certain sentence, on the other hand, listener could gain their comprehension through the relations such as cause and effect, intention, interpersonal relationship, time and space relationship. (5) listener classify the meaning according to the length of the discourse, gaining rough meaning of the long discourse and obtaining the detail meaning of short ones during comprehension process (Goodman 1975:55-58).
The vocabulary contains abundant meanings, for example, one word may have different meanings completely in different sentences, or different conditions. One sentence may also have different meanings when it comes from different contexts. Therefore, if the listeners would like to understand a sentence or a passage absolutely right, they must get to know the context of the passage especially. Only combining the specific context with the passage, can they understand the real meaning of the sentence or the passage. However, there are some English teachers that ignore the training for students on this aspect during the English teaching process. On the aspect of grammar, the learners need to master it rightly because it contributes to their listening comprehension. In addition, they should also pay attention to the differences between English and Chinese on expression. Taking the follow expressions for example, if they would like to ask the people who call the phone or who pick up the phone, they can say “Who is that?” Or “Who is speaking?” and so on, not to say “Who are you?” according to the way of Chinese expression. As well as, when the customers come into the store, hanging out to pick up the goods that they need, as a sales man , what the learner would rather say “May/Can I help you?” or “What can I do for you? than say “What do you want?”
Such a situation may happen during listening comprehension, a learner may understand every word and succeed in analyzing the structures of sentence, but he still fails to understand the dialogue yet. It is perhaps caused by lack of background knowledge. Culture is the soil of a language as language is the carrier of culture. When one is to learn a foreign language, he is expected to know about some habits, cultural background information, and living styles of the country. During the listening comprehension, difficulty may occur due to a lack of culture background knowledge. For example, the United States has set up a loneliness industry. In the sentence, “loneliness industry” refers to one part of welfare. It is typical background knowledge we should know. Owing to the fact that children do not live with their parent in the United States, there appears many elder people who live alone without being taken care of, which cause a problem to the society. Therefore, the government sets up a service aiming at helping the old and childless. Being faced with such topics, the difficulty may be increased, leading to misunderstanding and obstacles in getting information.
3.1.2 The lack Listening Training and the Cultivation of Students’ Listening Ability
Some learners regarded listening as a task to apprehend every spoken word or a task to gain complete understanding of the whole text. Although learners make use of the newly learned strategies in listening and do not see the results they expect, they experience frustration. For example, some learners resort to the resourcing strategy in order to understand all the unfamiliar words in the text. They believe that if these words were not tackled, comprehension problems would occur. This conception might have stopped them from exploring the possibilities of using other