英语—英语听力困难的原因及其解决方法.doc

本科毕业论文

英语本科毕业论文

英语听力困难的原因及其解决方法

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Difficulties in English Listening and Countermeasures

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摘 要
英语听力是一种获得有声信息的活动，也是一种交际能力。培养英语听力有助于全面提高我们的英语交际能力。人们曾试图用各种方法提高自己的英语听力，但他们并没有做调查探究对造成英语听力困难的原因，而是想当然的认为大量听，广泛听就能提高自己的英语听力。这种盲目练习听力的方法并不可取，因为听力是英语组成中的一部分，与其它环节有着密不可分的联系。造成听力困难的主要原因有以下几方面：基础知识不扎实（发音 词汇 背景知识）；缺乏听力技能（推测能力不强 反应慢 短期记忆能力欠缺）；没有良好的心理准备。如果想要提高听力水平，从以上几方面多下功夫，找出对策克服这些障碍，这样你想成为英语听力高手的愿望才能实现。

关键词：英语听力困难；原因；方法
Abstract
English listening is an access to sound information, as well as a communicative competence. Therefore, improving listening skill contributes to promote English communication skill. People have tried lots of methods to improve English listening skill. However, they have not investigated the real reason why English listening is so difficult, and they take it for granted that practicing more extensive listening can improve their listening skill. It is unreasonable, because listening is one part of English learning which has close relationship with other parts. Reasons that English listening is difficult can be discussed from several aspects: unstable basic knowledge including pronunciation, vocabulary and background knowledge; lacking of listening skills including poor prediction skill, slow response speed and poor short-time memory skill; and lacking of adequate psychological preparations. If you want to improve your English listening, you should work hard in these aspects, and find out countermeasures to overcome those barriers. Then you will be a top one in English listening.

Key words: English listening difficulties; reasons; countermeasures
Contents
摘 要 I
Abstract II
Contents III
1 Introduction 1
2 Difficulties in English Listening 1
2.1 Unstable Basic Knowledge 1
2.1.1 Pronunciation Barriers 2
2.1.2 Vocabulary Barriers 2
2.1.3 Background Knowledge Barriers 3
2.2 Lacking of Listening Skills 3
2.2.1 Poor Prediction Skill 3
2.2.2 Slow Response Speed 4
2.2.3 Poor Short-time Memory Skill 4
2.3 Lacking of Adequate Psychological Preparation 5
3 Countermeasures to Deal with the Difficulties 6
3.1 To Enhance the Basic Knowledge during Learning 6
3.1.1 Learning Pure Pronunciation of English 6
3.1.2 Expanding Vocabulary 7
3.1.3 Expanding Background Knowledge 8
3.2 To Train Listening Skills 9
3.2.1 Improving Prediction Skill 9
3.2.2 Thinking in English Thinking Mode 9
3.2.3 Strengthening Short-time Memory 10
3.3 To Improve the Psychological Quality of Listening 11
4 Conclusion 12
References 12

16

1 Introduction
“A number of people have frequently made the point that the total time and individual engage in communication: approximately 9% of which is devoted to writing, 16% to reading, 30% to speaking, and 45% to listening. (Wang 2000，16) Therefore, it is undoubtable that we should pay more attention to listening in the process of language teaching. According to these data, we can conclude that listening plays an important role in English learning. What’s more, English listening accounts for a great proportion in examination, and it becomes more and more important in English teaching. Although English listening is important in teaching, it is hard to improve one’s listening level. From the investigation, many people begin to use television, broadcast, radio, computer and other modern teaching equipments to train their listening skill. Some of them have practiced it for a long time, but receive little achievement Their efforts are in vain because they do not know the real reason why English listening is difficult.
The purpose of this paper is to provide some methods to help the listeners improve their listening level.
2 Difficulties in English Listening
Because English and Chinese belong to different language systems, it is unavoidable that there are many differences in pronunciation, intonation, vocabulary, and sentence structure between them. Therefore, it is very difficult to improve people’s listening comprehension. The following factors make up the difficulties.
2.1 Unstable Basic Knowledge
As we all know, for a grand building, bricks are necessary. If we compare listening as a huge building, the basic knowledge is just like the brick. Thus the basis is the first part for analysis. The main barriers in the basis are as follows.
2.1.1 Pronunciation Barriers
The biggest barrier in listening is how to distinguishing pronunciation. As we all know, if we wanted to understand listening materials, it is important for us to understand words. Some students can not understand the simplest words because they are weak in distinguishing the pronunciation of words such as phoneme, syllable, weakening and stress. In addition, they are also weak in distinguishing the rule including stops in sense-group linking, incomplete plosive and so on. All of these reasons bring so many difficulties to English listening.
What’s more, there are many differences between American English and British English. Generally speaking, British English is the major standard for English teaching. Therefore, Chinese students are familiar with British pronunciation. However, American listening materials spring up and become popular. With a poor listening comprehension skill, Chinese students consider listening as the most difficult part in English study.
There is another reason to explain why listening is difficult. In oral English, especially in free talks, we often hear some informal pronunciations. We have not learned the correct pronunciations in classes, and we just imitate the wrong one. It becomes a wrong circle: students’ listening skill becomes worse and worse.
2.1.2 Vocabulary Barriers
As we all know, vocabulary is the basis of English learning, and plays a leading role. In other words, vocabulary decides one’s listening level. We can suppose that a new word appears while you are listening, it must affect your comprehension of the whole meaning. Usually, you will wonder the meaning of the new word and lose the following material. Therefore, a bad result is destined.
According to the survey, we can find that lots of students have the problem in those words which they can easily understand in reading, but can’t understand in listening. It reflects that we distinguish fewer listening words than reading words. If we grasp fewer words, we will have poorer listening skill. Limited by language surrounding, Chinese students remember vocabulary by recitation instead of communication. During this process, they have not established the auditory image, so these words turn into information which they can read, but not listen. Only if we accumulate a certain number of words, improving listening skill will be reality.
2.1.3 Background Knowledge Barriers
A large number of students can not understand listening materials because they are lack of cultural background knowledge. For example, when there is always some information about festivals including Halloween, Thanksgiving Day, April Fool, you must feel confused about them if you have not heard them before. On the contrary, if the material is talking about Spring Festival, perhaps most of students can gain the main points. There is no denying that background knowledge is essential for improving one’s listening level.
Language is the carrier of culture. The background information which listeners are unfamiliar with will affect listeners’ listening comprehension. Therefore, it is important for students to grasp background knowledge about the culture about English-speaking countries. In Chinese, people always talk about the meals, while the weather is the common topic for Westerners. Thus, cultural differences can easily create barriers for listening. Many students do not focus on these kinds of knowledge, so they become puzzled when they understand the meaning, but cannot choose the right answer. That is because they just understand the literal meaning but not the deep cultural background meaning.
22 Lacking of Listening Skills
Only having a strong basic knowledge is not enough for you to become a top one in listening. Listening skills also play an important role in listening comprehension.
2.2.1 Poor Prediction Skill
Prediction skill means a student can guess what will come next according to their knowledge and logic. This skill is regarded as one of the most important factors in comprehension and plays an important role in one’s understanding of listening comprehension. It includes asking questions and answering them before listening. It also can be said that a good listener or a good predictor. If you have poor prediction skill, you can not have a clear context. For example, if you can predict what the main idea is and what will be told by this listening material after you have read the questions which have been given by paper, you will answer the question easily. Sometimes you may answer them just according to your prediction, but not due to listening process.
Therefore, poor prediction skill also causes the difficulty for English listeners. It is important for us to deal with this problem if we want to improve our listening skill. We should pay more attention to this point. Remember that, prediction can bring more clues than you can imagine, and it will benefit you in English listening.
2.2.2 Slow Response Speed
It is very common that many students complain that English listening’ speed are played too fast. They even blame this reason for their poor English listening skill. We can not deny that listeners will get a bad result for the too fast speed. If the speed is too fast, the information flows away, and listeners have not enough time to think about the speaker’s meaning, so it is impossible for listeners to understand the material.
As a matter of fact, some English listening materials’ speed are not played too fast to understand for listeners, they are still considered difficult. That is because the students are easily influenced by their mother language Chinese, they often translate English into Chinese and then understand. However, during listening, there is almost no time for them to translate. Therefore, the speed of the play the listening materials seems to be fast, and listeners’ response speed likely to be slowly.
2.2.3 Poor Short-time Memory Skill
The short-time memory is to remember a word which has just been heard until listeners gain the main idea of it, and then get rid of the memory, leaving enough space to keep another new-heard word. During listening comprehension, there is a short-time tie between listeners’ brain and the signal they have acquired, which is used by people to recognize, analyze, and represent the signal by literal form, and then digest it.
It has been proved that the short-time memory skill decides listening result directly. Because the process of short-time memory is too quickly to gain much information for us, it is another huge barrier in English listening. People always try their best to remember every word they have heard. For the reason that they can not gain the perfect result unless understanding every word. This method will overload listeners’ short-time memory and reduce the efficiency of memory. Usually, we can just remember the key word after finishing listening which will lead listeners’ blank brain. Most of the time, listeners get more unnecessary information, of which a disappointing result can not be avoided.
2.3 Lacking of Adequate Psychological Preparation
Listening comprehension is a complicated psychological activity. It has been proved that listeners’ emotion is one of the important factors which decides the listening result. Linguists also consider that students can not get any information when they are nervous or unconfident. Most of the listeners are not expert in listening. During the listening, they always feel nervous, especially when they heard some new words or some complicated sentences. Therefore, they become senseless and miss the useful information. At the same time, the normal level of listening is lowered.
There are also existing objective factors which affect listeners’ listening. For example, headphones of poor quality, uncommon accents from speakers, outside noises and so on. These factors will destroy listeners’ psychological defense at first, and then affect their listening comprehension.
“Psychological linguistics regards listening is involved with the perception of a language: Perception is to turn the voice into meaning, and it is an analysis of the language signal perception. The process of the language perception is an activity of the short-time memorization.”(Jia 1996，135) Therefore, we can conclude that a good listening result comes from strong psychological preparations. So it is important for listeners to have a good state while listening.
3 Countermeasures to Deal with the Difficulties
Now, it is turn to talk about some methods to deal with those difficulties in order to improve listeners’ listening level.
3.1 To Enhance the Basic Knowledge during Learning
Like the function of bricks, it is important for us to enhance the basic knowledge which endures us with the right to talk about improving listening skill. Some methods to explain how to accumulate basic knowledge are listed as follows.
3.1.1 Learning Pure Pronunciation of English
Firstly, the basic knowledge of English refers to pronunciation, such as syllable, stress, sense-group linking and incomplete plosive and so on. For example, different stresses can express different meanings, so we should pay attention to those points during listening practice.
In addition, there is another problem. Like dialects existing in our country, there is a wide variety of accents of English. American English and British English have many differences in pronunciation forms. If you want to improve your listening skill, it is important for you to be familiar with all pronunciation forms. It is because you have no idea of the pronunciation forms you will listen to.
Spoken English is different from written English. It is very easy for us to know the abbreviate form in written, but it is not true in spoken. For example, in a listening material, there is voice that “I can’t do that”. Sometimes, /t/ and /k/ lose erosion together in the sentence, because there is a very short pause before reading /k/, it is easy for us to listen to “can do’’. We get different answers for the listening. Therefore, we should pay more attention to practice in this aspect.
The most effective approach is listening more genuine recordings and imitating the pronunciation of the recording. If you feel it is boring, you can watching English movies or listening English songs instead of the recordings, but you need to bear in mind that you are learning, not just relaxing yourself. By means of experiencing real English, you can grasp English pronun