Factors Affecting Listening Comprehension and Countermeasures —— Several Factors Affecting Listening Comprehension and Countermeasures

Abstract: In today's information explosion and increasingly frequent international communication, listening, as one of the ways of human evaluation and communication, is becoming more and more important. Therefore, how to improve listening ability is an important link for people to learn English well. Most English teachers have put forward many good ideas and tried them. The author expounds the factors affecting listening comprehension and the solutions from several aspects.

Keywords: the cognitive impact of negative transfer of figure schema on the target language in listening comprehension

First, several factors affecting listening comprehension

(A) Listening and vocabulary

It is generally believed that the more you listen, the better your listening comprehension will be. There is no denying that listening more is a positive means to improve listening. However, the level of listening does not depend entirely on the number of times of listening, nor on the length and difficulty of listening. It is a comprehensive embodiment of one'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 to talk about dialogue, communication, reading comprehension, writing articles, etc., and listening is no exception. Every dialogue, paragraph and discourse in listening comprehension is composed of sentences, and the basic unit of sentences is words or phrases. In the process of listening, we can imitate the pronunciation we hear, but if we don't master a certain vocabulary, we can't relate it to the symbol it represents-the word, and we can't know what the symbol represents-the meaning.

So theoretically, the size of vocabulary determines the degree of listening comprehension on one side.

(B) the relevance of listening and reading

Many people have studied English for many years, but they may not understand what others say in English, even simple sentences. However, if you give them written materials in English, you can even understand or roughly understand some new words. This situation exists not only in the self-taught English crowd, but also in the students who receive formal training to varying degrees. At present, in English teaching, although students' listening training materials are often less difficult than reading materials, on the whole, students' listening level is still lower than reading level. In essence, this situation is related to the characteristics of psychological activities of listening and reading in foreign language teaching environment.

In mother tongue learning, from the perspective of the development order of skills, listening and speaking precede reading and writing, that is, firstly, the phonetic feature schema of the language and its corresponding schema about the objective world relationship are established in the brain; Then, the figure characteristic schema of language is established in the brain, that is, on the basis of listening and speaking, it progresses to reading and writing. Of course, the psychological activities of listening and reading are more complicated than reading. In a foreign language environment, the psychological process of listening is different from that of the mother tongue, and its characteristics are as follows.

1. Before mastering a foreign language, native English speakers must go through a process of superimposing or re-establishing language system charts in their brains. The sequence of this process is letters-words-sentences-chapters, and at the same time, it is necessary to gradually form and complete the establishment of phonetic feature schemas (such as voice, phoneme, rhythm, language flow, intonation, etc.). Therefore, the establishment of text schema and phonetic feature schema is synchronous. However, in foreign language teaching, the four skills of listening, speaking, reading and writing begin at the same time. Moreover, due to the influence of syllabus, content, time, methods, learning environment, individual differences and other factors, it is impossible for these four skills to develop at the same time in practice. For example, students often spend more time on reading training than listening training, and often use silent reading in the reading process, so the development of auditory organs and visual organs will inevitably be unbalanced. Experiments show that students have different reactions to the same word or words they have learned, and their visual debate ability is greater than their auditory ability to identify words.

2. The ability of "reading" (that is, calling both phonetic and text schema to recognize words) plays a very important role in foreign language teaching. Learners begin to learn a foreign language with words as the basic medium, and reading ability directly affects listening ability. Then, how to explain the relationship between reading training and listening comprehension in theory?

First of all, although the two training forms of reading and listening are different, they are both receptive and understandable language use processes, which are very * * *. From the lower level (phoneme, phoneme, word, sentence), in the process of listening comprehension, listeners use auditory perception knowledge to decode language materials and make various inferences. In other words, on the basis of sound discrimination, cognitive effects are used to make various explanations and judgments on language materials to achieve the purpose of understanding. At a higher level, in order to understand the meaning of an article (sentence), the listener needs to rely on cognitive effects to understand. This is because at the textual level, the generation of meaning is often the process of the listener's re-creation of meaning. In this process, the function of language form is often only to induce the listener to use the existing background knowledge to construct evaluation materials in a meaningful way, including using cultural knowledge to judge in advance and infer the speaker's intention. Obviously, the listener's cognitive process, cognitive effect and background knowledge are very important to listening comprehension. Take listening to the weather forecast as an example. Whether you can understand the relevant content accurately and quickly depends largely on the listener's geographical knowledge, basic astronomical knowledge and even some social and cultural knowledge, such as whether to use the Celsius system or Fahrenheit system in this respect, which is consistent with the process involved in reading comprehension. In reading, readers also use various cognitive processes and rely on various cognitive effects and their background knowledge to analyze and construct the semantics of the text. Therefore, in this sense, it is obviously helpful for learners to practice and use cognitive process and judgment and reasoning process, and constantly improve and perfect this ability.

Secondly, reading is a big input source of learners' comments, which not only increases the opportunities for learners to get in touch with comments, but also enriches learners' social and cultural knowledge of English-speaking countries, and broadens their vocabulary and background knowledge through extensive reading, which is undoubtedly very important for listening comprehension. In this way, learners are always consciously and subconsciously using the language knowledge they have learned and accepting new knowledge in the process of reading, and the accumulation of quantity will inevitably lead to a qualitative leap in language acquisition. Therefore, the greater the reading volume, the higher the quality and the higher the overall English level. Listening ability is a comprehensive embodiment of one's English knowledge.

(C) Listening and the listener's emotional state

In recent years, many scholars have explored and studied the relationship between learning strategies, language skills training and listening comprehension, and found that the emotional state of the listener has different degrees of related influence on listening comprehension.

From 65438 to 0990, a research group composed of English teachers of Beijing Foreign Studies University conducted a large-scale national undergraduate quality survey. (Note: See Foreign Language Teaching and ResearchNo. 1993No. 1) In the survey of sophomores majoring in English, the research group tested 17 independent variables and 13 social and psychological factors related to English learning. The results show that six factors, such as language ability and learning motivation, have the greatest influence on language comprehensive level. In addition, in the investigation report of 1990, o'malley Cha Mote also put forward the positive effect of selective "concentration" on listening comprehension.

It can be seen that the emotional state of the listener is a subjective factor affecting listening. 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.

Second, the solution

(1) Establish a listening teaching system aimed at expanding listening input and training listening skills. The mastery and improvement of various language skills influence and support each other. For China students, the improvement of reading level may play a very important role in promoting the improvement of other skills, including listening. Therefore, from the beginning, we should pay attention to continuous discourse teaching while practicing language forms, and pay attention to the authenticity and understandability of materials, the universality and communication of genres and the scientific setting of exercises.

(B) change the way of thinking, pay attention to listening skills, improve the speed and effect of memory. Due to different historical backgrounds and geographical differences, Chinese speakers and English speakers must have different ways of thinking. Therefore, knowing the necessary background and cultural knowledge of the target language and using the background knowledge to eliminate the interference of "negative transfer" in listening will definitely improve the memory effect. On the other hand, it is necessary to cultivate the listener's listening skills, conduct individual and overall listening training, so that the listener can identify and understand the listening materials at the phoneme, word and sentence level, or use his own background knowledge to understand the listening materials at the text level, so as to help them learn to grasp the key points and themes of the text, distinguish the main information from the secondary information and master the key words, thus effectively improving their listening level.

(3) Language listening is active decoding rather than passive perception, and it is a positive cognitive construction rather than a simple acoustic fact. Therefore, we should fully realize the importance of improving the cognitive level to improve the language level, optimize the psychological environment, eliminate emotional barriers, use a variety of audio-visual methods and means to create a variety of scenarios, and finally mobilize students' listening interest and motivation.

References:

[1] Wonderful American English listening. Ming Kai Publishing House.

[2] American English Listening Week Program. China book publishing house.

[3] English listening breakthrough in Senior Two. Hunan Normal University Press.