| Listening is considered to be one of the most difficult skills in English learning. As one of the receptive skills, listening is the foundation to develop other language skills. For a long period of time, the teaching of English in China has mainly focused on the teaching of reading and writing in the early stage of learning and neglected the teaching of listening and speaking. Many teachers are puzzled at the situation in the English class: though many students can get a good mark in English test, not all of them can perform well in listening and speaking. They reflect on what was wrong with the teaching and try to find out the solutions to these problems. And it is obvious that the learners do not have enough and effective listening and speaking practice in a scientific way. This thesis will focus on listening. The author mainly analyzes the common obstacles in the learning of listening and discusses how to develop the listening strategies to improve the ability of listening comprehension.First of all, teachers should help the students understand the nature and the process of listening comprehension. A number of experts in the field of cognitive psychology, psycholinguistics and pragmatics offer their views to describe the nature and the procedure of listening comprehension. According to the views of the experts, listening comprehension is an active process and an interaction between the listener's linguistic competence, background knowledge and the aural discourse and the sound message. And the procedure of the listening comprehension is divided into three models: bottom-up processing, top-down processing, and the integration of both bottom-up and top-down processing. In bottom-up processing, listeners focus on the sounds, words, intonation, and grammatical structures; in top-down processing, the listeners make good use of their prior knowledge and background knowledge to interpret the spoken discourse. In actual listening practice, students usually use both bottom-up and top-down processing models.In order to find out the obstacles in listening, the author designed a questionnaire to collect data. Seen from the data, the obstacles mainly lie in two aspects:1. Linguistic factors: including the knowledge of English pronunciation, vocabulary and grammar. Language knowledge is the basic foundation of listening comprehension. Poor pronunciation and limited vocabulary are the principal obstacles in the aspect of language knowledge.2. Nonlinguistic factors: including psychological factors, listening skills and strategies, background knowledge. Some students are tired of listening. They have lost their confidence to overcome the difficulties because they don't have a correct idea of listening comprehension. They take it for granted that the successful listening is 100% understanding of the listening materials. So they have given themselves unnecessary anxiety. Listening skills and strategies are both important teaching contents. However, some students don't know much about how to guess the unknown words from the context; how to find the main idea of a passage; how to make inference and predict. Listening strategies can be defined as the conscious activities of adopting the listening techniques and skills and other methods to facilitate the successful listening comprehension. For example, students can watch English films to get familiar with the pronunciations of the native speakers; or force themselves to follow the pace with the speaker's thinking process by taking notes of key words and important information.Background knowledge plays a key role in listening comprehension. Some students confess that they know little about the background of English speaking countries. As a result, they fail in understanding a passage or a conversation though there are no new words at all, just because of the lack of relevant background knowledge.The core of this thesis is to discuss the corresponding strategies of eliminating the obstacles in listening. For the part of students, their job is to build confidence t...
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