The Influence Of The Acquisition Of Formulaic Negatives On Learner's Listening Comprehension Ability

College English Curriculum Requirements (For Trial Implementation) issued in 2004 points out the objective of College English is to develop students' ability to use English in an all-round way, especially in listening and speaking. This is the first time that the importance of listening has been highly stressed. Furthermore, according to the latest notice of the Band 4 & 6 Test Committee, in the Band 4 examination of January, 2006, listening comprehension will account for 35% of the whole paper. While in light of Professor Yang Huizhong's research, for all the undergraduate students who attend Band Four examination, the average score of listening comprehension though, has increased from 10 points inl987 to 12.5 in 2003, however, there is still much room to improve. How can we improve their listening comprehension, an essential part of language proficiency?In Ur's opinion, language proficiency can be defined in terms of accuracy and fluency. In teaching so-called 'four skills'- listening, speaking, reading and writing - the emphasis will usually be firmly on fluency, which aimed at concentrating on the 'message': communicating or receiving content. Research has demonstrated that adults spend 40-50% of communication time listening, only 30% is devoted to speaking, 16% to reading and a mere 9% to writing (quoted in Rivers, 1978:62), therefore, among these skills, listening is of vital importance as a skill for communication as well as a medium for input in SLA. Beginning in the early 70's, some linguists brought attention to the role of listening as a tool for understanding and a key factor in facilitating language learning. Just as Feyten points out, listening has emerged as an important component in the process of SLA since then. At the beginning of the research on listening, people paid attention to the teaching method or methodology, now it seems the focus has been transferred to learning strategies such as cognitive strategies and metacognitive strategies. Students have to acquire so many strategies in order to learn best. There is no doubt such strategies couldhelp students in some way or other, and we can not deny their importance in helping students cope with their study, while in this case the pressure which teachers once have undertaken was passed on to students. But at the same time we can not forget the important role the teachers should play in the process of students' study. Just for this reason, I think it is necessary that we should go back and take a look at what have been found in researches before. In the process, I found a language feature, which has been discussed more or less by many researchers before and they have got different names for it, but I prefer to use the term recommended by Wray, that is, formulaic sequence, which refers to a sequence, continuous or discontinuous, of words or other elements, which is, or appears to be, prefabricated: that is, stored and retrieved whole from memory at the time of use, rather than being subject to generation or analysis by the language grammar. We know listening comprehension is closely related to short-time memory, if we could store certain groups of formulaic sequence beforehand, they will be able to help us unload our burden of decoding, and save time for our comprehension. So far, the researches abroad mainly concentrate on their employment in spoken and written English; little has been reported at home about the study of them in teaching, let alone in the teaching of listening. However, I think we may make use of them in improving students' listening comprehension; In order to verify my assumption, I chose two natural classes from the freshmen of the Politics and Law School in our university (altogether 36 students), one as an experimental group, the other control group. Before the experiment, their scores in the last year's listening comprehension test were quite similar, and the T-test showed there was no significant difference between the two groups. Moreover, they have been asked to take another two tests before the experiment - one listening test and one translation test, which serve as a further proof that the two groups have similar learning background and listening competence. Subsequently, the experiment lasted six weeks, the experimental group were trained to acquire negative formulas through 3 lectures and after-class practice, while the control group just had their routine listening class (once in two weeks).