听力理解中存在的问题及解决办法.doc

【英语论文】

题目： 听力理解中存在的问题及解决办法

年级：2009 专业：英语 作者：郭晓梅

Problems and Strategies in Learning Comprehension

摘要： 听力在英语学习过程中有着非常重要的作用。本文将讨论在听力理解中存在的问题并且在一群中国的英语学习者中调查这些问题。根据调查显示，总共有二十个因素影响学习者的听力理解，其中在参加调查的四十个学习者中的三分之二认为主要的因素有四个。结果表明为什么听力成为学习者的困难主要有以下四个方面：词汇和词语、记忆力、教育水平和背景知识以及心理因素。针对这些因素，本文将给出详细的解决办法。

关键词：听力理解；听力技巧；问题与对策

Abstract:
Listening is very important in the process of English learning. This paper discusses problems which influence learners’ reading comprehension and examines the extent of awareness of these problems among a group of Chinese ESL learners. According to the investigation, altogether there are twenty factors that influence learners reading comprehension, and among them four factors were reported by more than two-thirds of the forty language learners who participated in the investigation. The evidence shows that why listening is difficult comes mainly from four sources: vocabulary and idiom, memory, educational level and background, psychological elements. According to the problems, this paper will give some strategies to them.

Key words: listening comprehension; learning skills; problems and strategies

Table of Contents
Introduction………………………………………………………………1
Chapter One The Aim of Listening Comprehension…………………..2
1.1 The interpersonal function…………………………………………………...2
1.2 The transactional function……………………………………………………3
Chapter Two The Factors Influencing Listening Comprehension……..4
2.1 Vocabulary and idiom…………………………………………...…4
2.2 Memory……………………………………….……………………4
2.3 Educational level and background…………………………………5
2.4 Psychological elements…………………………………….….…...5
Chapter Three The Strategies of Listening Comprehension………...…7
3.1 Take some notes…………………………………………….…..…7
3.2 Guess the meanings of unfamiliar words………………………….7
3.3 Develop a good memory…………………………………………..8
3.4 Learn to predict correctly…………………………………...……..8
3.5 Enlarge the background knowledge ………………………………8
3.6 Keep a good mood…………………………………………………9
Conclusion………………………………………………………………10
Bibliography…………………………………………………………….11

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Introduction

Listening is one of the main ways to get information from the outside world. In the days of rapid development of science, technology and media, because of the close contact between China and English speaking countries, English seems more and more important in all kinds of fields. If you want to master a foreign language, you must improve your listening ability as quickly as possible. This paper will discuss the problems and strategies in listening comprehension.
The teachers often speak of the four skills- listening, speaking, reading and writing. That means each of them is important. You can't say that you have mastered the language without any one of them, Listening, one of the means of language communication, is used most widely in people's daily lives. About 45% of an adult's time concerns listening to other people, listening to the radio, listening to the music. I have done an investigation among 40 learners. About two thirds of the learners think that the most bothering and most difficult factors which affect their listening comprehension are: vocabulary and idiom, memory, educational level and background, and psychological elements.
Listening is one of the basic skills in language learning. The role of listening comprehension for communication in FL is obvious. Without effective listening skills, learners will never learn to communicate effectively. However imperfect the speech production of an EFL learner can be, he/she still has a variety of ways of conveying a message. Nevertheless, if the learner does not understand the interlocutor’s response, the goal of communication remains unfulfilled. Once assumed to be a passive activity, listening is now recognized as an active process, critical to SL/FL acquisition and deserving systematic development as a skill in its own right.

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Chapter One The Aim of Listening comprehension
The final and the most important purpose for language learning is to use the language, to communicate with people. We often speak of the four skills- listening, speaking, reading and writing. That means each of them is important. You can’t say that you have mastered the language without any one of them.
Listening, as one of the means of language communication, plays an important role in people’s daily lives. About 45％ of an adult’s time concerns listening to other people, listening to the radio, listening to the music. So we can say that listening is the ability to identify and understand what others are saying. This involves understanding a speaker’s accent or pronunciation, his grammar and his vocabulary, and grasping his meaning (Howatt and Dakin1974). An able listener is capable of doing these four things simultaneously. Willis (1984:134) lists a series of micro-skills of listening, which she calls enabling skills. They are:
1) Predicting what people are going to talk about
2) Guessing at unknown words or phrases without panicking
3) Using one’s own knowledge of the subject to help one understand
4) Identifying relevant points; rejecting irrelevant information
5) Retaining relevant points (note-taking, summarizing)
6) Recognizing discourse markers, e.g., Well; Oh, another thing is; Now, finally; etc.
7) Recognizing cohesive devices, e.g., such as and which, including link words, pronoun, references, etc.
8) Understanding different intonation patterns and uses of stress, etc., which give clues to meaning and social setting
9) Understanding inferred information, e.g., speakers’ attitude or intentions
And we can classify the thousands of purposes in the use of a language into 2 categories: to communicate and to exchange information, and respectively name them the interpersonal functions and transactional functions.
1. The interpersonal function
The interpersonal function means that the purpose of using the language is to communicate, when the speakers focus on the harmonious relationship between them, but not to exchange information. Although the speakers may exchange information

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during the conversation, yet it's secondary to the main purpose. This generally happens when people greet, chat, or try to kill time with friends.  
2. The transactional function  
The transactional function means that the main purpose of using the language is to exchange information. This function focuses on information but not the relationship.  The speaker cares if the information is expressed exactly and if the listener understands it correctly, so the language should be direct and brief. Examples can be found in news broadcast, speech, description or orders etc.

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Chapter Two The Factors Influencing Listening Comprehension

There are many factors that influence learners’ listening comprehension, and among them there are four factors that play important roles in listening comprehension. They are: vocabulary and idiom, memory, educational level and background, psychological elements.

1. Vocabulary and idiom
Vocabulary and idiom is the base of English learning. Lacking of vocabulary and idiom can affect the level of listening comprehension directly. Some people think that the more one listens, the stronger of his ability of listening comprehension is. It is no doubt that listening more is one of active means of improving one’s ability of listening comprehension , but one’s ability of listening comprehension doesn’t all lie on the times that one listens, it is the all-around embodiment of one’s English knowledge, While the base of all English knowledge is vocabulary and idiom. Vocabulary plays an important role in English learning, including in English listening. Each dialogue, each paragraph and each passage is made up of sentences, and each sentence is made up of words or phrases. In the course of listening, we can imitate the pronunciation that we have heard, but if you are lack of vocabulary, you can’t connect the marks that the words stand for with the words, and you can not know the things and meanings that the marks stand for. So in theory, vocabulary controls one’s levels of listening comprehension in a side. In my investigation, for 58.5% students, vocabulary and idioms become one of the most difficult things in listening comprehension. The more new vocabulary and idioms appeared in the listening material, the more difficult they feel when doing listening comprehension. The strange new words make the students lose the interest in going on listening. Most students may guess the meaning of the new word they heard just now, the result of which is that they miss the following part.

2. Memory
Although listening and reading are both regarded as inceptive skills, listening is more difficult than reading. When reading something, readers could come back to the previous part to reread, while for listeners, then couldn’t. if you can not concentrate,

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they will miss the important information, even the all. So in this case, memory becomes very important in listening comprehension. Trying to remember as much content as possible becomes the main goal for the English learners.

3. Educational level and background
The present English teaching places extra emphasis on the teaching of language, that is to say, teachers seldom introduce the history, geography, culture and custom of English speaking countries. The content of listening materials is broad, and the subject matter is various. For students, because of their limited educational level or lacking of background knowledge, they often feel that they can understand the words but not the meaning. We have found that students have difficulty if understanding the unfamiliar thing, even if there are no new words. The learning of language should be also the learning of culture, knowing about the background knowledge of English speaking countries, we can understand and use English more exactly. For example, there are two materials of the same difficulty. One is about something about China’s Spring Festivals, the other one explains the Thanks-giving Day of the western countries. The former is easy to understand but the latter is more difficult. Why? It is clearly because the students know little about the latter.
Learners’ educational level is various. Some students’ level is very low, while others’ is a bit higher. The existence of this variation makes the teaching of the listening difficult to execute. If the listening material is a little difficult, for example, many new words and the high speed, half listeners will get impatient.

4. Psychological elements
We can divide the psychological elements which affect the students listening comprehension into two aspects: one is not concentrating on the course of listening; the other one is tension, or bad mind-set. Some students are not interested in the material, or they don’t attach importance to listening, so they can’t concentrate on the listening material. And some students are fear of English or listening, because of fear, tension in the mind comes first, and then the bitty information.
As we know, listening is a psychological process in which the listener gains information actively. Only when the information is necessary or interesting will the students concentrate on it. A psychological research shows junior high school students can concentrate for 25 minutes while senior high school students 40 minutes. If the
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students are made to listen without preparation or guidance, it's certain that they will be nervous and may go loose easily. If they are often asked to do listening in such a poor psychological situation, it will have bad effects on their confidence. We should get the students prepared before listening, and we'd better adopt all kinds of ways to help them develop their psychological qualities

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Chapter Three The Strategies of Listening Comprehension

The improving of listening ability needs more practice. Listening comprehension is restricted by many factors, we should listen the tape again and again, on the other hand, we should pay more attention to improving the ability of listening comprehension. So we must pay particular attention to strategies of improving listening comprehension.

1.      Take some notes
Because of the large information, and much superfluous information, plus more difficult material, and high speed, we should make a good habit of taking some notes in the course of listening and we should take notes with skills.
As we know, the first or the last paragraph or sentence is the key point. So we should do our best to grasp the key words. For example:
“ The first people to come to New Zealand were the native Mauris, Who arrived between 600 and 1000 years ago and who today make up over 10％ of the population. Many people came to New Zealand from Britain in 19th century. New Zealand became a part of the British Commonwealth in1931. It is an independent English speaking country.”
From the material, we should write down the following words: “ native”, “600-1000”, “10％”, “Britain”, “19th”, “Br”, “commonwealth”, “1931”. Then we can say that we have grasped the important information. Of course, maybe you can not take so much information while listening first, so we need take notes with skills. Such as, take the first letter of the longer word, or make some signs and so on. That will help us grasp the key points of the listening material.

2.      Guess the meanings of unfamiliar words
Language learning needs large input. Large input needs guessing the meaning of unfamiliar words and look up the dictionary as few as possible, especially in the exams. Guessing can not only save time but also develop the abilities of analyzing language materials and listening comprehension. Once you master the methods of guessing skillfully, you will find that it is not difficult but very interesting to study English. Maybe you can not guess exactly at first, but you must gulp to look up the dictionary, then you will be clearer.
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You can guess the meanings of unfamiliar words according to the definition, the context clues, word formation, examples, comparison, and cause-effect and so on. Adopting these methods properly, you can save time, develop the ability of analyzing language material and improve the ability of listening comprehension.