A Comparative Research On The Effects Of English Phonological Awareness Training Upon Mongolian And Hanadult Learners’ English Listening Ability

For many years, phonological awareness has been a hot issue in the field of psychological linguistics. Most related researches mainly focused on the development of phonological awareness and the relationship between phonological awareness and reading, spelling, etc, which have concluded that phonological awareness played an important role in both reading and spelling. As important as reading, listening is a crucial part in English study. Little has been reported, however, in the literature about the correlation between phonological awareness and listening ability. Meanwhile, most research subjects are children, and little study is done with Han and Mongolian adult learners of English as a foreign language. So the author took Mongolian and Han non-English majors adult learners as research subjects to explore the correlation between English phonological awareness and English listening ability, as well as the difference between Mongolian and Han learners after training.Thus, the author conducted an experiment to answer the research questions. In the experiment, the subjects are 50 Mongolian and Han adult learners who were from different universities in Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region. The experiment contains four periods: pre-test, phonological awareness and listening training, post-test and data analysis. Before the experiment, the author tested students’ phonological awareness, listening ability and lexical resources by using testing papers. The outcomes showed that there was no significant difference in the level of phonological awareness, listening ability and lexical resources between Mongolian and Han learners. Based on that, the author carried out the daily listening teaching, combining phonological awareness training and practicing. After sixteen weeks’ experiment, Mongolian and Han learners took part in the post-test of phonological awareness and listening test simultaneously. The results are as follows: First, students’ phonological awareness and listening ability were highly correlated. Second, students performed better in both phonological awareness and listening after training, which demonstrated that systematic phonological awareness training could improve students’ phonological awareness and their listening ability. Third, comparing the phonological awareness and listening scores of Mongolian and Han learners, the author discovered that there were significant differences between them. Mongolian learners showed apparent advantages in phonological awareness and listening, and positive transfer from their first language also helped Mongolian learners to learn English well.Based on the outcomes of the experiment, the author summarized the limitation of this experiment and some suggestions for the future study, which expected to contribute to English listening teaching in minority areas.