Reading Aloud As A Learning Strategy To Improve Listening Comprehension In Senior High School

One of the reasons why Chinese learners meet with frustration in Englishlistening practice is that they are affected by the acquisition of Chinese when theylearn English. They usually pay little attention to the pronunciation of English words.This thesis aims to investigate whether we can improve a student's listeningability by strengthening his awareness of the importance of reading-aloud new wordsand training himto learn new words phonetically. The thesis is based onneurolinguistics, employs quantitative studies and makes an attempt to examine theeffect of reading aloud new words on listening comprehension.Speech understanding can be seen as a process, which begins with the listener'sperceiving the oral output from the speaker and ends up with the listener's catchingthe speaker's intention. The completion of the process can be further divided into thefollowing five stages:①speech awareness,②recognizing words,③employingsyntactic rules,④forming semantic pictures, and⑤inferring speaker'sintention(Wang Dechun, Wu Benhu and Wang Delin, 1997: 101, my translation). Thethesis put emphasis on the first two stages, in whichthe listener picks out speechsounds from the input sound stimuli and then recognizes phonemes and phonemecombinations (that is, syllables) under the support of the phoneme system stored inone's memory. After that, the listener makes comparisons between the input phonemecombinations and his internal lexicon in his memory; if there is antithesis betweenthem then words are recognized. Therefore, a language learner fails to match thepronunciation with its corresponding word in his internal lexicon when there is noadequate phonetic information of words stored in his memory. On the other hand,when reading aloud, a language learner receives visual, auditory and oral stimuli atthe same time. The brain receives the auditory stimulus, forming and strengtheningthe sound representation of words in his memory thus improving the connection ofthe sound, form and meaning of words in his internal lexicon. This is what the authorchose to be the theoretic foundation of the thesis.A pre-experiment investigation is presented in this thesis, which aims to provide support to the connection between reading-aloud and listening comprehensionthrough a set of reading-aloud test and listening test. Then a comparison experimentis carried out in Senior Grade One in No.20 Middle School. After the pre-testguarantees that the experiment and the control classes are at the same level ofreading-aloud and listening, a reading-aloud training is provided to the experimentclass. When the training comes to the end, a reading-aloud test is given to the twoclasses, whose results show that the experiment class gains superiority to the controlclass. A listening test is held in these two classes then and the results show that thelistening performance of the experiment class is a little better than that of the controlclass, which implies that reading aloud does help listening comprehension.