Factors affecting listening comprehension and solutions: Several factors affecting listening comprehension and solutions
Abstract: In today's era of dramatic increase in information and increasingly frequent international exchanges, listening, as one of the ways of human evaluation and communication, becomes even more important. Therefore, how to improve listening ability is an important step for people to learn English well. Most English teaching workers have put forward many good opinions and made attempts. The author here elaborates on the factors affecting listening comprehension and their solutions from several aspects.
Keywords: listening comprehension character schema negative transfer target language cognitive effect
1. Several factors affecting listening comprehension
(1) Listening and Vocabulary
Most people always believe that the more you listen, the stronger your listening comprehension ability will be. It is undeniable that listening more is indeed a positive means to improve listening comprehension. But the level of listening level does not entirely depend on the number of times you listen, nor does it entirely depend on the length and difficulty of the content you listen to. It is a comprehensive reflection of a person's English knowledge, and the foundation of all English knowledge is vocabulary. Vocabulary plays a vital role in English learning and is the basis of all training. Without a certain vocabulary, there is no need for conversation, communication, reading comprehension, writing articles, etc., and listening is no exception. Every conversation, paragraph, and text in listening comprehension is composed of sentences, and the basic unit of a sentence is a word or phrase. In the process of listening, we can imitate the pronunciation we hear, but if we do not master a certain vocabulary, we will not be able to connect it with the symbol - word it represents, and we will not be able to know what the symbol represents - significance.
Therefore, theoretically speaking, the size of vocabulary determines the degree of listening comprehension on one side.
(2) Correlation between listening and reading
Many people have studied English for many years, but they may not be able to understand others speaking English, even very simple sentences. However, if written materials in English are given to them, they can read or roughly understand even some new words. This situation not only exists among people who learn English by themselves, but also exists to varying degrees among students who have received formal training. Currently, in English teaching, although students' listening training materials are often less difficult than reading materials, overall, students' listening level is still lower than their reading level. In essence, the occurrence of this situation is related to the characteristics of the mental activity process of listening and reading in the foreign language teaching environment.
In mother tongue learning, from the perspective of the sequence of skill development, listening and speaking precedes reading and writing, that is, the phonetic feature schema of the language and its corresponding relationship diagram of the objective world are first established in the brain. formula; and then establish a schema of language character characteristics in the brain, that is, progress to reading and writing on the basis of listening and speaking. Of course, the psychological activity of listening and reading is more complicated than the psychological activity of reading. In a foreign language environment, the psychological activity process of listening is different from that in a native language environment, and its characteristics are as follows.
1. Native speakers must go through a process of superimposing or re-establishing a diagram of the language system in the brain before they can master a foreign language. The sequence of this process is letters - words - sentences - chapters. At the same time, the establishment of phonetic feature schemas (such as sounds, phonemes, rhythm, speech flow, intonation, etc.) must be gradually formed. Therefore, character diagrams The establishment of formula and phonetic feature schema is at the same time. However, in foreign language teaching, the four skills of listening, speaking, reading, and writing start at the same time. Moreover, due to the influence of various factors such as syllabus, content, time, methods, learning environment, and individual differences, these four skills are affected by factors such as syllabus, content, time, and individual differences. In practice, it is impossible to develop these skills simultaneously. For example, students often spend more time on reading training than listening training, and they often use silent reading during the reading process. In this way, the development of the auditory and visual organs is bound to be unbalanced. Experiments have shown that for the same word or several words that have been learned, students have different reactions to listening and seeing, and their ability to debate through vision is greater than their ability to identify words through hearing.
2. The ability to "read" (that is, using phonetics and character patterns to identify characters at the same time) plays a very important role in foreign language teaching. Learners start learning foreign languages with characters as the basic medium. Therefore, reading ability directly affects listening ability. So, how to theoretically explain the relationship between reading training and listening comprehension?
First of all, although the two training forms of reading and listening are different, they are both receptive and understanding language use processes, and they are very similar. From a lower level (phonemes, phoneme groups, words and sentences), in the process of listening comprehension, the listener uses auditory perception knowledge to decode language materials and make various inferences. In other words, on the basis of phonetic identification, cognitive effects are used to make various interpretations and judgments on the language material to achieve understanding. From a higher level, in order to understand the meaning of a text (sentence), the listener needs to rely more on cognitive effects for understanding. This is because at the discourse level, the generation of meaning is often a process of the listener's re-creation of semantics. In this process, the role of language form is often only to trigger the listener to use existing background knowledge to construct meaning in the review materials, including using cultural knowledge to prejudge and speculate on the speaker's intention. Obviously, the listener's cognitive processes and cognitive effects as well as the background knowledge mastered are very important to listening comprehension.
Take listening to the weather forecast as an example (a topic often tested in listening comprehension tests). Whether the relevant content can be understood accurately and quickly depends to a large extent on the listener's geographical knowledge, basic astronomical knowledge, and even some social Cultural aspects, such as whether the region uses the Celsius or Fahrenheit system, are consistent with the processes involved in reading comprehension. In reading, readers also use various cognitive processes and rely on various cognitive effects and background knowledge to conduct semantic analysis and construction of text. Therefore, in this sense, learners practice and use cognitive processes and judgment and reasoning processes, and continuously improve and perfect this ability, which obviously helps to improve listening comprehension.
Secondly, reading is a large input source of comments for learners. It not only increases the opportunities for learners to be exposed to comments, but also enriches learners’ knowledge of the social and cultural aspects of English-speaking nations. , and broadened their vocabulary and background knowledge through extensive reading. These three points are undoubtedly crucial to listening comprehension. In this way, learners are always constantly, consciously and subconsciously applying the language knowledge they have learned during the reading process, and accepting new knowledge. The accumulation of quantity will inevitably lead to a qualitative leap in language acquisition. Therefore, the greater the amount and quality of a learner's reading, the higher his overall English level will be, and listening ability is the comprehensive reflection of a person's English knowledge.
(3) Listening and the listener’s emotional state
In recent years, many scholars have explored and investigated the relationship between learning strategies and language skill training and listening comprehension to varying degrees. It was found that the listener's emotional state has a correlation with listening comprehension.
In 1990, a research group composed of teachers from the English Department of Beijing Foreign Studies University conducted a large-scale survey on the quality of Chinese undergraduate students. (Note: See "Foreign Language Teaching and Research" Issue 1, 1993) In a survey targeting second-year students majoring in English, the research team conducted a survey on 17 independent variables and 13 social psychological factors related to English learning. The test results show that six factors, including language ability and learning motivation, have the greatest impact on the comprehensive language level. In addition, O’malley Chamot also proposed the positive effect of selective “concentration” on listening comprehension in his 1990 survey report.
It can be seen that the listener's emotional state is a subjective factor that affects hearing. Specifically: without good motivation and self-confidence, the listener's attention is often easily distracted, thus interfering with the listening process. This is the so-called "emotional filtering" problem in language input.
2. Solution
(1) Establish a listening teaching system aimed at expanding listening input and training listening skills in a targeted manner. The mastery and improvement of various language skills influence and support each other. For Chinese students, the improvement of reading level may play a very important role in driving the improvement of other skills including listening. Therefore, from the beginning, attention should be paid to continuous discourse teaching while practicing language forms, and in the selection of materials, attention should be paid to the authenticity and comprehensibility of the materials, the breadth and communicativeness of the genres, and the scientific setting of exercises sex.
(2) Change the way of thinking, pay attention to listening skills, and improve the speed and effect of memory. Due to various factors such as different historical backgrounds and regional differences, the way of thinking of people whose mother tongue is Chinese and people whose mother tongue is English must be different. Therefore, it is necessary to understand the necessary background and cultural knowledge of the target country and listen to it. Using background knowledge in the process to eliminate the interference of "negative transfer" will definitely improve the memory effect. On the other hand, it develops the listener's listening skills, conducts individual and overall listening training, and allows the listener to use auditory sensory knowledge to identify and understand listening materials at the phoneme, word, and sentence levels, or allows the listener to use his or her own The background knowledge helps them understand the listening materials at the text level, thereby helping them learn to grasp the key points and main ideas of the text, distinguish main information and secondary information, and grasp key words, so as to effectively improve their listening level.
(3) Language listening is active decoding rather than passive perception, and it is an active cognitive construction rather than a simple acoustic fact. Therefore, it is necessary to fully understand the importance of improving cognitive level in improving language proficiency, at the same time optimize the psychological environment, eliminate emotional barriers, use a variety of audio-visual methods and means, create a variety of scenarios, and ultimately mobilize students' interest and motivation in listening.
References:
［1］Brilliant American English Listening. Kaiming Publishing House.
［2］American English Listening Week Plan. China Book Publishing House.
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[3] Breakthrough in English Listening in the Second Year of High School. Hunan Normal University Press.