Astudy On Factorsaffecting Listening Proficiency Of Chinese College Non-English Majors

This paper reports an investigation of factors affecting listening performance of L2 learner both from internal and external points of view. The participants were 126 students selected from three levels of English proficiency: lower level: Level 1; intermediate level: Level 2 and high level: Level 3. The process of instrument development is based on a semi-structured interview which involved another two students with lower-high listening proficiency, along with a review of the relevant literature related to factors affecting listening comprehension. Two factor analyses resulted in a 41-item instrument.A statistic analysis of data from students at each level shows that the questionnaire has robust reliability and validity. From this study, there are three major findings emerged. One is that there are four factors which affect listening proficiency of L2 learners most and they are cognitive factors, beliefs and attention, listening strategy and background knowledge. Another is that each group at different English levels resulted in the same factors as from all the students as a whole. The third one presented by one-way Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) indicated that every factor plays different roles in affecting L2 learners'English proficiency. Specifically, factor 2 and factor 4 (beliefs and attention, background knowledge) affect students at higher English lever much more than those at lower levels. Factor 1 and factor3 (cognitive factors, strategies) affect students both at high level and low level significantly, yet show not much effect on the immediate-level students. This study points out that in training L2 English listening, teachers should focus on cognitive factors, their beliefs and attention on listening, strategies use and accumulation of background knowledge.Findings of this study make contributions to both English teaching and learning. For cognitive factor, on the one hand, teachers can teach students how not to focus on difficulties but to continue to listen to other parts that may give some clarifications or signs. On another, teachers can teach strategies which may help students improve their listening, such as a direct strategy that provides students with sufficient exposure to English listening contents. For the factor of beliefs and attention, teachers can help students build confidence on listening comprehension and control their attention as well as concentration while they are listening English contents. Firstly, teachers can encourage students to use non-linguistic knowledge to overcome the difficulties. For instance, students may speculate the content by using prior knowledge. Secondly, for precise listening, the text should not be too long because it is hard for people to concentrate on one thing for a long time. In this way, the listening contents should be selected carefully.For strategy use, it is advised that teachers could spare some time to give an instruction on strategies use so that students would be conscious of making use of strategies when doing listening practice. The last factor, background information, it is suggested that teachers introduce the themes of passages and new lexicons to students before listening texts are given.