| The thesis reports a study on the factors which affect listening comprehension from three aspects, and the building of a three-dimension model of English listening by means of comparative experiments. In the experiments, it contrasted students from No. 19 and No. 15 Middle Schools of Year 2000 in Qingdao. It aims at studying the teaching elements: (1)which factor affects the low proficiency students' listening comprehension, how to solve the problem, what are the effects?(2)Which factor in the teaching materials is most adapted to class teaching, what are the effects?(3)What other factors are involved in the listening comprehension?(4)Why is it necessary to study the teaching of listening in the three-dimensional system? It used qualitative and quantitative studies to identify the results of the experiment with listening tests, interviews, comparative studies and questionnaire surveys, and finally built the teaching model with complete introduction and identification from the listening test and a questionnaire survey.The major findings presented in the thesis are as follows:1. Among all the factors that affect listening comprehension, sound and rhythm has the most significant effect on the low-level listeners. Information processing theory has demonstrated that sound and rhythm are the initial form of the information. If a listener lacks proficiency in chunking streams of speech and automatising sounds to scripts, he or she will feel it difficult to make further processing, and he or she will make mistakes.2. The experiment has demonstrated that listening strategies can be taught in class, involving the teaching of metacognitive, cognitive and social/affective strategies. The practice of strategies really improved students' listening comprehension and three strategies can be taught together in the three-dimensional framework. But the experiment also indicated that listening strategies as a whole have a significant predicting power to listening achievement, but only to a limited degree. The students' use of strategies could be effective only when the listening material is at their instruction level.material is at their instruction level.3. In the analysis of teaching materials, the textual schema is the best one which is suitable for the teaching of listening. Because the teaching materials in the middle schools of China are stable and routinized, it provides possibility for the teaching of textual schemata in class. And many researchers also indicate, top-down processing should be encouraged from the initial stage. The teaching of textual schemata helps to train listeners such abilities. However, the comparative test also demonstrated that the brief structure of textual schemata could not help listeners make deep comprehension and understand the implied meaning, which needs more research.4. The use of strategies and the effectiveness of strategy use are closely related to the language proficiency level of the learners. No matter what the text is, familiar one or unfamiliar one, the high proficiency classes did better than the low proficiency classes. This result reflects that linguistic knowledge (including words and grammar)is the basis of teaching and studying. The use of listening strategies will not take effect without the help of linguistic knowledge.5. In the study of teaching methods, if only one factor of the teaching system is emphasized, or if all the factors are involved but fail to be connected with each other in a three-dimensional way, no system in FLT could be established and the function of the whole system which is bigger than that from the addition of all the factors could not be fully developed either. Therefore, the study on the teaching of listening must be based on the three-dimensional system, connecting and interacting three main factors: subject of teaching (the listener), the object (the listening language) and the teaching environment (the teacher, textbook, means of teaching, learner's mother tongue and other conditions etc.)In light of the f...
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