Comparative Study On Listening Attention Of English Majors At Different Proficiency Levels

Listening comprehension is an active process of mental activities that requires strict concentration in information processing. It is closely connected with attention, a character of cognitive psychology. Attention, which points to and focuses on some objects, has been attached importance at the primary stage of the development of psychology. With the arrival of behaviorism, attention was no longer given its deserved value. With the development of cognitive psychology in the late 1950s, the researches on attention have gotten concerned and several theories of attention appeared. Though listening cannot be simply regarded as paying attention, there is no doubt that attention plays an important role in listening comprehension. Attention is the first stage in listening. In listening teaching and learning, one of the problems taken seriously is the students'attention.Drawing inspiration from the theories of attention such as Broadbent Model (1958), Treisman Model (1960), Deutsches Model (1963), Kahneman Model (1973), Shiffrin & Schneider's (1977) automatic processing of attention and the factors affecting attention (Telford & Sawrey, 1968; Child, 1981; Schmidt, 1990; Verderber, 1999), the author investigated the English majors at Grade 2004 (the lower grade) and Grade 2002 (the higher grade) of College of Foreign Studies, Guangxi Normal University in Guilin by means of a questionnaire and an interview for the purpose of finding out the phenomenon of listening attention at different proficiency levels. The author analyzed the relative statistics, explored whether there is a change in listening attention between the higher and lower graders, explained how the patterns change and why to change, found out the inherent relationship between the listening scores and listening attention and the implications of the study on listening teaching and learning, and then sought the effective methods of improving listening teaching and learning to strengthen students'abilities of listening. The results of analyses and comparisons indicate: the listening attention of the higher graders is poorer than that of the lower graders; the listening scores of the higher graders are lower than those of the lower graders; the students who pay their effective attention to listening obtain better scores than those whose focus is poor in attention. The analytical results also show that the differences of listening attention between the higher and lower graders result from their listening purposes, motivations, states of mind, etc. rather than their intelligence, which reveals the indication from the theories of cognitive psychology that in the process of learning, the learner's attention and his listening purposes, motivations, states of mind, etc. are mutually affected. The analytical results imply that listening is a process in which the high degree of concentration is required and that listening teaching and learning is an activity in which the attentive factors should be created for the learners and the attentive tendencies of the learners should be stimulated. The schools, teachers and students themselves should play major roles as...