The Positive Effect Of Reading Aloud On Listening Comprehension

Listening is one of the basic skills in language learning. However, many senior high school students often complain that they can not recognize some familiar words, phrases or sentences while listening but it is easy to find them when seeing the tapescripts. Teachers are the centre of the traditional listening teaching, in which masses of comprehensible input is emphasized to be given to students to improve their listening ability. As one of the skills in language leaning, undoubtedly, listening can not be isolated from comprehension of language, but traditional listening teaching neglects the rule of listeners' information processing. Armed with some theories of listening teaching and researching, and the related theories of the information processing system, this paper tries to point out that the main process of listening comprehension is sound discrimination, or the perception ability of the second language sound. But how can listeners improve the perception ability? General researches consider large quantities of listening input as an effective way to improve the ability, while the self sound feedback as another method is often ignored. According to the theory of speech perception in psycholinguistics and the theory of sound presentation, the self sound feedback can make the sound presentation of second language more clear and the ability of discriminating specific sounds strengthened, and thereby, it can promote the sound processing of listening input. By describing the nature and characteristic of reading aloud with the help of neurolinguistic theory, the paper seeks to find out whether reading aloud can play a positive role in sound discrimination of listening comprehension.On the basis of the above theories, the author conducted an experiment on the students of Senior Two to prove whether reading aloud could improve English learners' ability of listening comprehension. The result showed that reading aloud was beneficial to the development and perfection of English learners' listening comprehension skill, suggesting that listeners' self sound feedback enhanced the awareness of sound-symbol relationship, and the transformation between words and their sound discrimination systems.