| This thesis will try to analyze second language listening comprehension process from a cognitive perspective, and try to prove the hypothesis that in passage listening comprehension, intermediate and low level students tend to adopt bottom-up rather than top down processing model due to their limited knowledge on the linguistic aspect of English. The subjects of the research are 101 newly-enrolled college students. A questionnaire and three tests are conducted in the research. The study will try to reveal how variables like language proficiency (LP), students'ability to recognize words (WR), their knowledge on vocabulary and structure (VS), and background knowledge (BK) affect listening comprehension performance. Results of the research are analyzed with computer SPSS (11.0). The results show that students'performance in passage listening is significantly correlated with LP, WR, and VS. Background knowledge does not have so much effect on intermediate and low–level students'listening comprehension. Further studies show that Word Recognition (WR) plays very important role in the listening comprehension of low-level students, while Vocabulary and Structure (VS) is the major predictor in the listening comprehension of the intermediate students. Language difficulty plays a more important role in students'listening performance than the familiarity of the passages. The study shows that students of intermediate and low levels spend much more time on lower level processing, leaving little room for higher level processing. And they tend to adopt bottom-up processing model. With the improvement of their listening comprehension, they depend more and more on top-down model. In the listening classes of those intermediate and low level students, the teacher should pay more attention to the teaching of vocabulary & structure and the training of their ability in speech perception, especially in the first two terms of their college life.
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