A Study Of English Majors' Listening Comprehension Barriers And Solutions

To improve the ability of listening comprehension has always been the focus of language teaching. The ability to understand what is listened is one of the main requirements for English majors. So in the process of English majors' listening acquisition, it is vital important to make students aware of their barriers in acquiring listening abilities and develop the students' listening ability and strategy.This study aims to investigate the various barriers students encounter and what kind of strategies they most often use in their listening comprehension practice. Based upon investigation and research, the paper tries to convince that strategies of listening can be learned and trained in view of students' complaint of their existing barriers in the listening process, and their ability of listening can be promoted with the training of strategy. Our study aims to find that by changing beliefs and attitudes in listening, lowering anxiety, students' can obtain apparent improvement in their listening performance; and by acquiring listening strategies, students' can make obvious achievements in listening comprehension proficiency and competence.This thesis consists of five chapters.Chapter one presents a brief introduction to this study, the current situation of English listening and the importance of it in language learning. The necessity and significance of this study will also be explained in this part.Chapter two presents a review of the literature on related studies concerning listening comprehension barriers, processes, listening strategies and also training models of language learning strategies.Chapter three outlines the methodology, the findings and analysis of the study, the purpose of this part is to research: What barriers have the students encountered during their process of developing listening proficiency? What strategies have the students developed and applied to facilitate their listening comprehension? And after the research for these questions, the finding and analysis about students' existing barriers in listening comprehension will be thoroughly presented.Chapter four shows in detail the solutions to cope with students' listening barriers, namely, to change students' beliefs and attitudes in listening, to lower their anxieties and to train students' listening strategy. This part explains how to change students' beliefs and attitudes in listening and also how to lower their anxieties. Training students' listening involves firstly identifying and diagnosing the students' strategies so that the training program devised will be effective. The second stage is conducting the training and the third is evaluating the training. After having been trained in learning strategy, students from the experimental classes are compared with those of the control classes in the aspects of test scores and achievements.Chapter five is the conclusion, which summarizes the findings, addresses the limitations of the study, and proposes the possible implications and suggestions for further research.