An Experimental Study On Correlations Between The College EFL Learners' Phonetics And Their Listening Comprehension

Listening occupies an important position both in the human everyday life and in foreign language learning. In second language learning, listening is also assuming greater and greater importance. Like reading, it provides input for EFL learners, and "without understanding input at the right level, any learning simply cannot begin" (Rost, 1994:141).Since the 1970's, along with the development of cognitive linguistics and psycholinguistics, many scholars reached an agreement on one point that listening is a course of language comprehension, which involves two processings: "top-down" and "bottom-up".According to Richards (1990), top-down processing refers to how we use our world knowledge to attribute meaning to language input; and how our knowledge of social convention helps us understand meaning. Bottom-up processing refers to the direct decoding of language into meaningful units, from sounds, to words, to grammatical relationships, and to meaning.In listening teaching research area, top-down processing has gained much concern in recent years. Scholars emphasize the significance of supplementing background knowledge to the learners(Buck,1994; Rubin,1994; Tsui & Fullilove,1998). Some assert that listening strategies are helpful to the enhancement of listening level (Robin, 1975; Mendelsohn, 1994).These studies mainly concern the non-linguistic factors such as background knowledge, emotion, predicting, monitoring, etc.. Merely lingering in the peripheral part of listening by investigating how these factors affect listening, and not touching on the essence of listening itself, they can only have an assistant and compensatory effect on listening comprehension.The present study, based on the theory of bottom-up processing, attempts to find a new method to promote an English learner's listening comprehension. With phonological decoding being the first step in the bottom-up processing, phonetics training is endowed with great significance in listening comprehension. An experimental study was carried out to verify the two hypotheses: (1). there are direct correlations between an English learner's phonetics and his listening comprehension; (2). phonetics training enhances listening comprehension.