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Barriers and Solutions to Text Comprehension in College English Listening Test

Author: ChenJuanJuan
Tutor: LinLi
School: Xiamen University
Course: English Language and Literature
Keywords: listening testing text comprehension inferential skill cohesion devices schemata
CLC: H319.9
Type: Master's thesis
Year: 2008
Downloads: 231
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Abstract

Listening comprehension has ever been called "Cinderella skill in second language learning" (Nunan, 1997: 47). It is really vital yet largely neglected. Listening not only provides input for the learners, but also constitutes the first step of communication. It is the most basic ability in all intercommunications. So with the frequent exchanges between China and other countries in various fields in recent years, listening comprehension is increasingly becoming acknowledged as an important facet of language learning.Yet, listening is students’ common weakness. They get lower marks in the listening part of the test, compared with the reading, writing and translating parts. Students complain that passage understanding is the most difficult section due to their limited vocabulary. Vocabulary, the basis of constituting a language which is essential to producing an infinitely large number of sentences to convey meaning, is really of vital importance and can’t be neglected. However, text comprehension in listening is not to test students’ understanding of individual words, but to test their textual competence, the ability to interpret the meaning of the text as a whole. Since most passages in listening tests are relatively longer texts, the limited capacity of people’s working memory alone makes the text comprehension a tough task. It’s not easy for the mind to remember and recall all that listeners have heard successfully. Therefore, it’s important that some skills should be applied to text comprehension in listening tests. Students’ inferential skill is just a key one. Listeners should be able to make good use of the cohesion devices to infer what they are going to hear (explicit information conveyed by the text) and to make judgments by activating their schemata (implicit information), the background knowledge, to help reconstruct and interpret the meaning of a text. Although in recent years, many researches have been done into listening and text respectively, few dealt with them together. So the thesis intends to carry out the research, investigating some of the difficulties non-English majors encounter in listening text comprehension and trying to explore some possible countermeasures to improve students’ listening ability so that they can better understand listening texts.This thesis consists of five chapters.Chapter One deals with the concept of listening comprehension. After an elaboration on its definition, nature and process, an introduction to the current situation of English listening teaching and testing in China is made to point out the importance of listening comprehension in communicative language testing.Chapter Two focuses on some literature reviews on text and text comprehension. It involves the concept of text, features of the text—cohesion and coherence, schema theory in listening comprehension and listening strategies in text comprehension.Chapter Three, the core of the thesis, tries to analyze in detail students’ barriers to text comprehension in listening testing. On the words level, "unknown" words (words known to students in reading but not in listening) and unknown words’ influence on text comprehension are treated respectively. On the text level, barriers mainly center on students’ insufficient knowledge on cohesion devices and their inefficient activation of schemata, which are both deemed rather critical for students to apply their inference strategy in the process of listening comprehension.Chapter Four refers to some surveys to clarify the barriers. A series of tests were taken including both words tests and text comprehension tests. After tests, I had casual interviews with students. Data collected and interviews confirmed the barriers to their text comprehension in listening.Chapter Five, in response to the above-mentioned barriers, is aimed at working out some feasible solutions such as enlarging students’ listening vocabulary, enriching their background knowledge so as to help improve students’ correctness in listening text comprehension.The final part is Conclusion where the main points of the thesis are summed up and the limitations are reflected.

Barriers and Solutions to Text Comprehension in College English Listening Test

Abstract

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