Impact Of Vocabulary Size And Strength On English Listening Comprehension

In the early 20^th century aural test was first put forward. From that time up to the 1940s when listening test was formally requested, and further to the present time, the listening test of foreign language has been around nearly one hundred years. During this period of time, both native and foreign researchers have done much research work on listening comprehension, and they have made a great success. Meanwhile, in the field of vocabulary research, many other researchers have also made satisfactory achievements in vocabulary tests. However, most researchers carried on their theoretical researches into listening and vocabulary separately. Few researchers connected them together. In view of the situation, we carried out current research.In this research, vocabulary was first put into two kinds: reading vocabulary and listening vocabulary, then listening vocabulary was further divided into four layers by the degree of difficulty. They were passive recognition, active recognition, passive recall, and active recall. In the experiment, vocabulary was in fact altogether divided into five layers which were so-called vocabulary strength in the present thesis. Their correlation with listening ability was assumed to increase gradually one after anotherWe chose 60 sophomores from Taiyuan Normal College in this research. Later, we arranged them to attend five different vocabulary tests. Finally we made a detailed analysis of their scores, together with their scores collected from final-term listening comprehension test with SPSS 11.0.This research intends to perform three functions as follows:(1) At the micro-level, this research will offer implications for vocabulary teaching and testing.In this research, two terms were introduced. They were vocabulary size and vocabulary strength. Accordingly investigation was done at different vocabulary levels. This research will make people acquire a thorough knowledge of vocabulary, and thus offer implications for vocabulary teaching and testing.(2) At the micro-level, this research will also offer implications for listening teaching and testing.In this research, we investigated vocabulary at five different levels and at an angle of listening comprehension. This revealed the nature of listening comprehension and its relation with vocabulary, and thus facilitated the development of listening teaching and testing.(3) At the macro-level, this research will speed up the all-round reformation of listening teaching and testing.This is an empirical research. It makes people get a relatively complete understanding of vocabulary and listening comprehension. This research caters to the current great requirement for listening comprehension in our country and the situation that listening test begins even at primary school, but many pupils feel it is quite difficult. Thus this research will help to solve the difficult problems long existing in listening comprehension.