A Study On The Correlation Between Inference And Learners' Listening Achievements

Listening comprehension is important for university EFL learners in China. Anyhow both learners and teachers find listening comprehension a hard nut, because few strategies are available to assist them in teaching and learning listening comprehension. The current study, based on the theories of psycholinguistics, believes that inference is a helpful skill to improve learners' listening comprehension. The study is carried out to test to what extent inference is related to listening comprehension and how inference affects learners' listening comprehension.Questionnaire, test papers and interview were used as research methods in the study. The subjects involved in the research are 55 first-year English majors in Capital Normal University, who were divided into the experimental group and the control group. The results of two department-scale listening comprehension were also used to test the correlation between learners' inferring ability and their listening comprehension achievements. The paper adopted SPSS to deal with the obtained data. The result shows: there exists a high positive correlation between learners' inferring ability and their listening comprehension; learners depended on semantic clues more often than the syntactic clues to do prediction, while the pragmatic clues were used the least; poor listeners were more passive than good listeners in the course of listening comprehension; training learners on the inferring skills helped learners enhance their confidence in interpreting the heard passage and assist learners in understanding a spoken text.The pedagogical suggestion put forward by the paper is that: teachers should direct the learners to pay enough attention to the particular features of the aural information. Deliberate and special training on how to make use of the available information should be carried out so that learners can become sensitive to the existing clues. There should also be further corresponding exercises so that the learnt rules can be enforced in learners' minds.