The Effects Of Language Proficiency And Topic Familiarity On Non-English Majors' Listening Comprehension

Listening comprehension is always an important topic in the research of L2 acquisition. To college non-English majors, listening comprehension is a difficult as well as a vital point in their study of English. Beginning with an extensive review over listening comprehension at home and abroad, the thesis points out that though it is universally accepted that listening is no longer a passive and receptive skill, the understanding of the process of listening comprehension is still open to discussion.The present study tries to explain the process of listening comprehension under the framework of RT. It takes listening comprehension as an active communication between listeners and speakers, which is an interaction between new information and old information, and a process that listener seeks optimum relevance through making inferences.Since 1986, RT has been widely and successfully applied to analyze numerous language phenomena. Nevertheless, previous studies of listening comprehension from the perspective of RT can be hardly found in literature, the empirical studies are even scantier. Therefore, an empirical study is necessary to be conducted.This empirical study investigates topic familiarity and language proficiency level's effects on students' listening comprehension performance in the test. Its goal is to reveal the cognitive process of non-English majors' listening comprehension. The subjects are 110 non-English majors randomly selected from sophomores of AHNU, among whom 28 are selected from the College of Politics and Law specially. As for samples selection, the classes have been drawn lots, while the subjects are equidistantly selected. All the 110 students are required to listen to two familiar and two unfamiliar passages at the same time. A questionnaire on topic familiarity is followed immediately after the test. The analysis of the results is carried out in two approaches: quantitative and qualitative. In quantitative analysis, Chi-Square Test, T-Test, One-way ANOVA, Correlation and Partial Correlation are adopted. A detailed description of the results is provided, which is further explained from RT perspective.The findings of the empirical study demonstrate that topic familiarity has significant effect on the listening achievement of Chinese non-English majors. Those who are familiar with the topics always perform better than those who are unfamiliar with the topics. Language proficiency level also has positive effect on the listening achievement of Chinese non-English majors. Those of higher language proficiency level always have higher scores than those of lower level no matter whether they are familiar or unfamiliar with the topic. Among topic familiarity and language proficiency level, topic familiarity plays a more important role in influencing subjects' listening performance. But there is no significant relevance between a subject's own topic familiarity and language proficiency level.