A Study Of The Effects Of Four Listening Supports On English Listening Comprehension Of College Students

The thesis is aimed at finding out the effective listening supports for students at three different levels of listening proficiency through studying the effects of four types of frequently-used listening support (providing background knowledge, vocabulary instruction, repeated input, and previewing questions) on students'listening performance.The subjects in the study were 120 freshmen from four parallel classes of non-English majors in Hunan University. The One-Way ANOVA of the scores of placement test and final test showed that there was no significant difference in listening proficiency levels among the four classes. In order to investigate the interactive effect of listening support and listening proficiency, the students were divided into three subgroups (high, medium and low listening proficiency) according to the listening scores of placement test and final examination. During the process of experiment, firstly the students in the four classes took a pre-test without adopting any listening support separately. Then they were trained separately with different listening supports. The purpose of training was to make them know how to utilize listening support to enhance their listening comprehension. At last, they all took part in the post-test. Before the post-test, the four classes were guided separately to adopt the same listening support as they had practiced in the training period. Immediately after the test, all the students fulfilled the questionnaire about their feedback to the effects of the four listening supports.This study gathered data from pre-test, post-test and questionnaire. For the data processing, GLM analysis, ANOVA analysis and Paired T-test are used to analyze the tests'scores; and the data of questionnaire is processed by percentage. After analyzing all the data, the major findings were obtained as follows:First, on the whole, the two most effective ways to enhance listening comprehension were providing students with repeated input and topic preparation. However, the effects of preview questions and vocabulary instruction are not so good.Second, taking students'listening proficiency into consideration, repeated input produces the salient effect just for high listening proficiency and medium listening proficiency students, while low listening proficiency students can not get much help from it. Topic preparation is facilitative for students at three proficiency levels. But topic preparation is more necessary for low listening proficiency students because it can compensate for their lack of linguistic knowledge.Third, vocabulary instruction is found to be effective for high listening proficiency students. However, medium listening proficiency and low listening proficiency students benefit little from it. In fact, vocabulary instruction seems to have a negative effect on their listening.Fourth, preview question is found to be effective for high listening proficiency and medium listening proficiency students but not for low listening proficiency students.Fifth, students'feedback shows that preview question, vocabulary instruction, repeated input and topic preparation are important factors for their listening comprehension.Based on schema theory, the author analyzes, discusses and explains the findings and results.According to the above findings, the author puts forward suggestions for the application of the four frequently-used listening supports in the teaching of listening: Teachers are supposed to adjust different listening supports according to students'proficiency level in order to facilitate their listening comprehension.Due to the constraints of time and condition, the findings are limited. But it provides some practical data for future research in this field.