English Listening And Its Root In Psycholinguistics

This paper tries to find out the overlapping part of listening and psycholinguistics, which is cognitive psychology, through research and analysis. Firstly, it explores the relationship between listening and communication to emphasize the role that listening plays in communication. And then it goes on telling how to acquire effective, attentive and active listening. In chapter two, it puts more emphasis on the process of listening, which includes top-down and bottom-up process. Moreover, we also discuss how the listening processes work and the listening strategies accordingly. In chapter three, we begin to analyze listening in a cognitive perspective, and listening process can be regarded as a process of perception. It continues to reveal the three steps in decoding process, attention, interpretation and retention. In chapter four, it mainly deals with the psychological mechanism of listening process. In this chapter, we review information processing theories in cognitive psychology. Information is processed within three temporal stages of memory: the sensory memory, the working memory and the long-term memory. And listening comprehension can be divided into three stages: perception, parsing and utilization. This section lays the psychological foundation for listening. It also offers the listening strategies to explore and tells us listening can be classified into interactive listening and transactional listening. In chapter five, we try to find out the cognitive elements in listening comprehension and the cognitive solution to listening. Moreover, it also explores the possibilities of applying multimedia in the teaching and learning of listening. Chapter six mainly discusses how to improve listening in class; it presents some useful activities to activate the students' prior knowledge, such as warm-up exercises and so on. On a whole, this paper analyses listening in the eye of psychology especially cognitive psychology, which should be the root of listening and offers some strategies and solutions to listening learning and teaching.