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AbstractMost Chinese middle school students regard English listening comprehension as the most difficult part among all kinds of examinations. They feel that listening materials are too difficult to understand, and the speed of delivery is so fast that anxiety easily takes place during their listening comprehension. This paper mainly analyzes the comprehensive factors that affect English listening comprehension, and suggests some ways to improve listening comprehension from two aspects; on the one hand, students must first have a good command of linguistic knowledge, and form a good habit of listening and taking notes while listening. On the other hand, teachers should spot out students problems during listening and accordingly, try to help them by giving appropriate information, background knowledge, setting proper tasks in and out of class and design various and interesting tasks to improve their skills of English listening teaching. Key Words: listening comprehension; factors; junior students; improving; communication 摘 要大多数中国初中学生普遍认为听力理解是各种考试中最难的部分。他们认为听力材料难懂，语流太快以及经常有听力焦虑感。本文主要分析影响听力理解的综合因素，并从两方面提出一些改进听力理解的有效途径。一方面，学生必须扎实地掌握语言知识体系，包括对语音、语法、词汇等的掌握，养成良好的听力习惯，边听边做笔记等，并且积极参与两种富有主动性和交际性的听力活动。另一方面，老师必须即时发现学生在听力中出现的问题，即时采取措施解决, 相应地为学生提供适当的信息、背景知识等，布置适量作业，课内课外对学生进行辅导，设计并组织多样而有趣的听力活动来改进听力教学。 关键字: 听力理解；因素；初中学生；提高；交流ContentsContents.v1. Introduction.12. Literature Review .1 2.1 Listening Comprehension.1 2.1.1 The Definition of Listening Comprehension.2 2.1.2 The Role of Listening Comprehension.23. Research Methodology.2 3.1 Subjects.3 3.2 Interviews.34. Factors Affecting Students English Listening Comprehension.3 4.1Internal Factors.3 4.1.1 Linguistic Proficiency.4 4.1.2 Background Knowledge.7 4.2 External Factors.7 4.2.1 Speed of Delivery and Different Accents of the Speakers.8 4.2.2 The Contents and Task of Listening Materials.9 4.2.3 Context.9 4.2.4 Co-text.105. Methods of Improving Students Listening Comprehension.10 5.1 Improvement of Linguistic Knowledge and Listening Skills.10 5.1.1The Pronunciation, Stress and Intonation that Obstruct Listening Comprehension.10 5.1.2Vocabulary.11 5.1.3 Grammar.11 5.1.4Inferring Information not Directly Stated and Learning to Predict.12 5.1.5 Taking Notes.126. Conclusion.13 References1. Introduction As we know, listening, reading, writing, speaking and translating are the five basic skills in language teaching and learning. Listening, one of the means of language communication is used most widely in our daily life. About three quarters of an adults time concerns listening. Listening plays the first and the most important role in learning a foreign language. In China, however, teaching listening has been neglected for a long time. The teachers pay less attention to listening comprehension. What most teachers do in class is merely to play the recorder and check the answers. They did not realize the factors affecting students English listening comprehension and its importance. Some try to help students to understand the content by constant stopping and repeating and explaining word by word. However, English listening is a more complex activity in which the listener is expected to have the ability to follow the general trend of what is said, to understand special details, and to infer the speakers intention. So, the paper will discuss about this: What factors affect Chinese junior students in English listening comprehension? How to improve our Chinese middle school students English listening comprehension? 2. Literature Review2.1 Listening Comprehension There are many researches carried out on listening comprehension in recently twenty years. Fewer researchers not only look listening comprehension as the isolatable language skill, but also fix eyes upon the function language learning process. To understand listening materials well, it concerns some knowledge which involves understanding a speakers accent or pronunciation, grammar and vocabulary, grasping his meaning and so on. Generally, researchers believe that listening comprehension is the most important link in language learning process, in this field, there is a famous theoretical about Krashens input hypothesis and comprehensible input.When we think of learning a language, traditionally we think of learning four basic skills: listening, speaking, reading and writing. Listening is listed first not only because it appears first in natural first language acquisition but also because it is used the most. While the importance of the listening skill for developing language competency has long been recognized, the actual mechanisms for listening comprehension have been only vaguely described. Listening was often classified as one of the skills of reception rather than production like speaking, making it seem a passive skill. However, as Rivers points out “listening comprehension is a very active skill”.Research into speech perception has shown that listening comprehension involves far more than mere decoding of the sounds. Rivers in her discussion of speech perception identifies three stages; the listener must recognize that the sounds are an actual message and not just noise. This recognition means to the listener that the sounds are elements of the language system; the listener identifies sounds along with lexical and syntactic forms by segmenting and grouping them; recoding in order to retain the auditory message in long-term storage. These stages are necessarily rapid and overlapping. Whether the process of listening comprehension is as described above or in some other forms, it is certainly an active process involving cognitive processing.2.1.1 The Definition of Listening Comprehension Listening comprehension means that listener is in the progress of decoding the word meaning from the Received Pronunciation symbols which tends to the movement of and active thoughts (Li Chengxing, 2005:113).2.1.2 The Role of Listening ComprehensionListening comprehension belongs to the language comprehension system; the whole system consists in language processors and general problem-solver (GPS). Language processor is inter linked with psychology dictionary, when it gets pronunciation message, then transform each vocabulary, syntax and semantic to a phonetic message. And a general problem-solver is communicated with listeners knowledge, and the relative experience and background knowledge in his memories for application. Thus, it can help to understand the parole message from the speaker in these ways of forecasting, supposing and inferring.3.Research Methodology 3.1 Subjects Forty-five junior school students in a country middle school in Yuxi are employed as subjects. This is a normal class among the six classes of Grade One.3.2 Interviews Informal interviews were conducted during the break time. To get reliable information, the talks with students were taken in the form of chatting without any recording. This way made students feel at ease and like to talk with the teacher in a frank way.4. Factors Affecting Students English Listening Comprehension “Listening comprehension can be affected by various factors which can be identified as internal and external. Internal factors refer to the listeners characteristics, language proficiency level, memory, age, gender, background knowledge as well as aptitude, motivation, and psychological and physical factors. External factors are mainly related to the type of language input and tasks and the context in which listening occur” (WangYinglan,2004：85). 4.1 Internal Factors4.1.1 Linguistic Proficiency“Language proficiency, listeners linguistic knowledge, is a major variable in the studies of listening comprehension” (WangYinglan,2004：86).Listeners linguistic knowledge, such as phonetics, grammar, lexicology, affect their listening ability internally. () Problems on phonetics and phonology “Everybody knows that phonetics studies human speech sounds and the way they are articulated, and phonology deals with the sound system of a particular language” (RenXiaopin,2001：39). “According to an American scholar, Rita Wong, phonetics is crucial in listening comprehension. This is because sound is the direct medium of listening and speaking. Only by using correct sound, can we express our views and ideas accurately. Similarly, it is inevitably that poor pronunciation will cause aural difficulties in smooth acceptance of others ideas expressed in correct pronunciation” (MaZhanxiang,2002：96). Unfortunately, we found that many Chinese students lack basic knowledge of sound discrimination and phonetic changes, which severely hinders their improvement in listening ability.(a) Phonetic discrimination For most Chinese students the discrimination of some sounds is a problem in listening comprehension, especially, some vowels, such as /i:/ and /i/. For example, they can hardly distinguish the words like “live-leave”.(b) Phonetic Varieties Phonetic varieties include liaison, incomplete plosive, word stress, sentence stress, intonation and so on. Liaison is one phenomenon of sound changes in phonetics, which occurs between two words in a phrase or a sentence. Liaison usually occurs when the first word ends with a consonant, such as letter n, l, r, t, or, d, and the second word begins with a vowel. “In liaison and assimilation there are two kinds of sound changes. One is that one sound is pronounced more like its adjacent sound. The other is that a phoneme is inserted between two dissimilar sounds” (ZhangGuihua,2004：100). Take “Could you help me?” for example. In general “could” is pronounced as / kud/. In this sentence, listeners will hear it as /kud ju/ when “could” and “you” are in assimilation. Loss of plosive is also one important factor influencing listening comprehension. Usually a complete plosive occurs when two stop sounds are adjacent in a word or in a phrase, and incomplete plosive occurs when a stop sound precedes one of the fricative sounds or when a stop sound precedes one of nasal sounds or liquid sounds. Word stress is also an important factor that interferes with listeners understanding of the words. For example, because of its two kinds of stress, “record” has two meanings. Its two main semantic functions are that it may distinguish the parts of speech between two words (a verb and a noun), which are alike. Besides, it is frequently more difficult for the beginner to listen to and understand some English speakers if they are not familiar with stress patterns. In an English sentence, whether or not a word is stressed depends on what kind of syntactical functions and morphological features it has.In addition to the above, intonation is of equal importance in affecting listening comprehension.(ii) Problems about grammar Grammar is a means to the original factor of accuracy in any language. However, in recent years, learners usually focus on communicating skills, preferring to ignore grammar acquisition, which influences listening ability to a great extent. English spoken language frequently contains forms that could be considered ungrammatical in writing abounds in verbal clauses, ellipses that would be frown up in a good writing. Insufficient and incorrect grammar knowledge usually leads to difficult listening. (iii) Lexicological problem. New words appearing in the listening passage seem difficult to students. Students usually assume that if they do not know all the words, they cannot understand the passage. So when they hear unfamiliar words, they become nervous and ponder the word. As a result, they fail to accept the following sentences. Actually none of us listen to every word spoken to us, yet we can understand what is said. To help students overcome the difficulties in terms of vocabulary, teachers should convince them that even if they do not know certain words, they can still understand the message. Students should be encouraged to engage in an active process of listening for meanings, using not only the linguistic cues but also their non-linguistic knowledge. Teachers then can purposefully train students to listen to information carried by the passage instead of individual words. Students can guess the meaning of certain words from context to understand the information.4.1.2 Background Knowledge Background knowledge is an important factor that influences comprehension. Current views on listening comprehension agree that background or prior knowledge can affect listening comprehension. Cultural background knowledge, history and customs are important ones that can affect listening comprehension. “Language is a kind of cultural expression. It is very necessary for students to know some background about English countries, such as the history, culture, customs and habits, even life styles” (WangYinglan,2004：36). “Gaps in our knowledge of second language culture, of the associations and references available to native users, can present obstacles to comprehension” (Anderson, AnneLynch,1988：35). Many students are lack of these kinds of knowledge, so they think listening is very difficult. For example, there are two materials of the same difficulty. One explains something about Chinas Spring Festival; the other is about Thanks Giving Day of the west countries. The former is easy to understand but the latter is more difficult, why? It is clear that the students know little about the latter.4.2 External Factors “The external factors that affect listening comprehension for both the first language and the second language listeners are mainly related to the type of language input and task and the context and co-text in which listening occurs. In terms of language input and task, research in both L1 and L2 has shown that important factors include: The degree of linguistic complexity (lexis and syntax) The length and conceptual difficulty of the textThe amount of time allowed to process the text The speed of the listening The speed of delivery and the comprehensibility of the accent (Wang Yinglan, 2004：86)4.2.1 Speed of Delivery and Different Accents of the Speakers “For English learning, listeners of English, Griffiths found potential evidence that speech faster than two hundred wpm is hard for intermediate learners to understand” (WangYinglan,2004：86). It is not the speed of listeners but the speed of the speaker that dominates the interaction. Unlike reading or writing, students cant listen at their own paces. They have to go with the rate of the voice that they are listening to. “Many students have experienced the anxiety during listening. They tend to miss much part of a taped material when they fail to recognize a word or a phrase and stop to think about it” (YanMeiying,2001：69).This suggests that students cant expect to grasp every detail on the first hearing. Such expectation can only increase their anxiety, which has a negative effect on listening comprehension. Besides, it is unnecessary to translate English into Chinese in the mind. The listener should catch the most important points. In addition, listening to spoken English is to let students listen to different varieties and accents rather than just the voice of their teacher. Besides British English, they may come across American English or other English.4.2.2 The Contents and Task of Listening Materials Listening to spoken English involves a wide range of topics, such as advertisements, news broadcast, plays, songs, speeches, conversations and other kinds of communication. “In terms of task, Bucks introspective case study shows that comprehension is affected by the location of the question, that is, whether the question is given before or after the text, and the lexical items used” (WangYinglan,2004：85).4.2.3 Context Context refers to the spatial-temporal location of the utterance, i.e. on the particular time and particular place at which the speaker makes an utterance and the particular time and place at which the listener hears or reads the utterance. Participants in a communication will decide in what context the communication event lies. The context governs the participants expectations and then interpretation of utterances. But sometimes one side may fail to understand the context he is in. Thus, even a straightforward reply can cause misunderstanding unless uttered against a background of shared context and background. For example, the simple question “What time is it now?” may mean differently in different context.(1) (A mother is shopping with her young daughter)A: What time is it now? B: Its one oclock already.(2) (A young girl is watching TV with her parents on a Sunday night) A: What time is it, honey? B: Its ten now. A: I know it is very late.In each case the semantic meaning of “What time is it now?” is the same, but they mean differently in different context. In example (1), it requires straightforward information of time. In example (2), the mother is implying that it is time for the girl to go to bed. 4.2.4 Co-text Co-text is another major factor influencing the interpretation of meaning. It refers to the linguistic context or the textual environment provided by the discourse or text in which a particular utterance occurs. Co-text constrains the way in which we interpret the response. For example, A: Are you coming to the picnic with us? B: I have a paper to finish by Monday.Here we can infer that the person is not going to picnic by judging from the co-text. 5. Methods of Improving Stud
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