An Exploratory Study Into The Effect Of Key Words On English Listening Comprehension

Listening comprehension constitutes an important part of a language learner's language competence, which has long been a main problem for our EFL students, thus it has been a great concern that has haunted Chinese English teachers. Many researchers at home and abroad have made a body of researches and have gained great achievements on listening comprehension studies. In recent years, many English teachers and researchers have shown great interests and have probed into how to identify key words and how to use key words as nodes to activate and spread knowledge during listening process from the viewpoint of micro-listening skills. During the long time of EFL listening comprehension practice, the method of identifying key words during listening or the method of offering listeners pre-listening instructions of key words has been adopted by many language teachers. However, these viewpoints were only derived from their teaching experience, not based on the scientific researches.Decades before, foreign scholars like Richards, O'Malley and Chamat put forward that identifying key words was one kind of cognitive strategies which will enhance foreign language learning greatly. The psycholinguists think that listening is a complex psychological process combining perception with language; while cognitive psycholinguists consider language understanding as the process of meaning construction of a complicate psychology. Listening comprehension has been recognized not as a passive receptive skill but as an active complex cognitive process. The present author, drawing inspiration from the theories of attention, semantic spreading activation model and typicality effect theory, investigated the English majors enrolled in 2005 of the college of foreign studies of Guangxi Normal University , explored how key words work and how learners deal with key words in the dynamic process of listening comprehension. Mainly, three research methods are involved: listening tests, questionnaire and interviews.The statistics packet of the social science software (SPSS,VER12.0 ) was used for statistical analysis. Through detailed analysis and repeated comparison of the research data, we found: 1) when provided with written material, students can recognize key words according to the exercise items, which is much more evident in HL students. The average percentage of correct answers in the part of multiple choices of each listening comprehension test is above 80%. However, rehearsal result of the same listening text is not very good. The answers of multiple choices can not necessarily represent learners'practical listening comprehension ability. 2) When not provided with any written material, students often view their familiar words as key words, the rehearsal results are poor. 3) Although both of HL group and LL group have a strong desire to improve listening comprehension ability, few of them take listening material as a whole to acquire global understanding during listening process. Therefore, we draw conclusions as follows: 1) Most of students are not able to use key words or their familiar words to activate and deepen their listening comprehension. 2) Making right choices in the exercises of multiple choices can not necessarily demonstrate that learners completely understand the listening material. 3) While listening, the key words are not fixed words; they are subject to changes due to the different ability of people's acquiring information from person to person. There is no criterion for reference to identify key words like we often do during reading.The paper consists of five chapters. Chapter One introduces the background and the origin of the present research, states the research questions and significance. The information presented in Chapter Two is intended to review the literature that addresses the act of listening comprehension. The body of the literature review includes four sections. The first three sections are about the nature of listening comprehension, a historical overview of listening comprehension studies, the relationship between listening and reading. The last section will outline the theoretical bases that guide this study. Chapter Three reports the procedures of the present research, which includes the research purposes (specific research questions), subjects, research methods, and the way of data collection. The analysis of the data collected from one questionnaire and two listening comprehension tests, and from the interviews is also included in this chapter. Chapter Four is devoted to the findings, interpretations, discussions of the research. Chapter Five serves as conclusions of the present study. Also in this chapter, lessons learned in this research and suggestions for pedagogy and the limitations of this research are included.