An Empirical Study On The Cognitive Process Of Listening Comprehension In EFL Setting

In the studies of SLA, listening has aroused great concern among researchers and language teachers due to its important function in intaking of language input. A great number of studies have confirmed the effect of listening comprehension on second language acquisition. Yet most of the researches on listening comprehension in our country mainly focus on the study of listening procedure and on the various macro and micro listening skills by which a better performance on listening comprehension would be achieved. The direct research into what Chinese English listeners actually do while listening has been quite scarce.This research is concerned with my empirical study of the cognitive process underlying EFL listening comprehension among English major undergraduates studying in Chinese non-key universities. In order to set the stage and provide readers with a clear picture of the current achievements in the field, it is necessary to review the research literature concerned with listening comprehension. Both theoretical and empirical research on EFL listening comprehension from different perspectives have been fruitful, however, no clear and unequivocal consensus exists among them, and sometimes the research is merely based on one perspective which is certainly less convincing.On the basis of the previous research on EFL listening comprehension and the specific context of English learning in a Chinese classroom, this paper proposes a comprehensive EFL listening comprehension model integrating schema theory and relevance theory perspectives into the paradigm of information processing which hopes to give a guideline in understanding the cognitive inference mechanism of Chinese English learners. Then with four research questions, the paper made an investigation of English major undergraduates'listening processes with two spoken listening discourse. The subjects are sophomore students and senior students attending Hunan Agriculture University, Hunan Institute of Engineering and Hunan University of Science & Technology. The testing instrument is the recall protocol and the supplementary self-report questionnaire which allow gaps in comprehension and the intrinsic inferring mechanism to surface, a feature that other methods of evaluation can not...