Learning Mechanism Of Adult EFL Learners' Listening Comprehension Within "Cognition-Knowledge Bilingual Double Structures"

The Cognition-Knowledge Bilingual Double Structures Theory (CKBDS) was firstly put forward by Professor Yin Demo, dean of School of Foreign Language Studies in Xihua University, in the 3^rd Asian TEFL International Conference on November 5^th, 2005. CKBDS mainly concerns the correlations between language and thinking, and the mental learning mechanism of adult EFL learners. Prof. Yin and his postgraduates (2007) have explained the CKBDS from macro-perspectives of adult's English learning mechanism and psycholinguistic representations of Chinese adult EFL learners. In order to make a further understanding of the relations between English and Chinese of "bilingual double structures" in the learning process of Chinese adult English learners, this thesis makes a theoretical and empirical study on the learning mechanism of adult EFL learners' listening comprehension—one of the most important language skills. This thesis consists of six chapters:Chapter One, Introduction, introduces the aim and significance of this research, and defines the key terms which are widely disputed in the research areas of Foreign Language Learning (FLL) and Second Language Acquisition (SLA).Chapter Two, Literature Review, gives a detailed introduction to the related researches or studies of listening comprehension and mother tongue thinking in the FLL and SLA at home and abroad, and points out the limitations of those researches.Chapter Three, Framework of "Cognition-Knowledge Bilingual Double Structures" Theory, analyzes the origins and contents of CKBDS and makes a combination of CKBDS and English listening comprehension, which theoretically paves the way for the empirical study in next chapter.Chapter Four, Empirical Study, two experiments—one is on non-English-major freshmen and the other is on English-major postgraduates in Xihua University-are taken in this chapter to verify that in the English learning process, Chinese adults are inevitably influenced by their mother tongue in the two aspects of knowledge and cognition. If properly guided, the native language can improve listening comprehension and listening skills of English learners.Chapter Five, Explanations of Chinese Adults' CKBDS in English Listening Process Based on the Relationship between Language and Thinking, clearly points out that CKBDS is essentially a study on the interrelations of English and Chinese in cognitive process. Through the data and analyses in Chapter Four, we can get the conclusion that bilinguals cannot control choosing which language to think while they are listening to English, there are many factors affect this process. Based on the theoretical and empirical analyses, this chapter also discusses the implications for English listening learning and teaching.Chapter Six, Conclusion, summarizes the main findings of this study, and the limitation is also pointed out for future study. The following are the conclusions:(1) Chinese adult English learners are inevitably influenced by their mother tongue when they are listening to English, especially for those who are in low English proficiency; the effect is mainly manifested in the phenomenon of "mental translation". For high proficient English learners, the influence from their mother tongue is much less, and MT thinking can promote their English listening comprehension.(2) Low proficient English learners tend to rely on their mother language heavily to think and output when they are listening to rather simple materials. When the listening materials are difficult for them, even if they use English to output, it does not show that they are thinking in the target language. Actually, most of them do not understand the information but just write down the words or sentences they hear without cognitive processing.(3) FL thinking is not the precondition but the result of foreign language learning. With continuous foreign language learning, FL thinking is increasing while MT thinking is reducing as the language proficiency is improving.Moreover, low proficient English learners always guess the answers of multiple choices while they are taking the tests of listening comprehension. So a further reform needs to implement if we want to measure the learners' actual proficiency and language skills of English listening comprehension.