Effect Of The Voa Online Dictation System On College Students' Listening Comprehension

With a series of reforms on CET Band Four and Six, there is a growing concern about how to improve college students'listening comprehension. It has been confirmed by many experts and scholars that college students should do more autonomous listening in their spare time and online listening materials are popular since the birth of Internet. However, compared with the increasing number of WBLL materials, there is a lack of evaluations to them, which may be a barrier to students'effective autonomous listening. VOA online dictation system, designed by Hu Jiang, started to run in 2008. In order to identify the effect of VOA online dictation system on college students'listening comprension, 62 sophomores of two classes majoring in marketing were chosen to participate in the 10-week study.The participants were required to write diaries during the 10-week phase takeing down dictation errors, improvement of memory, and reflections on dictation. Also, the participants took the pre-listening tests at the beginning of the semester and the post-listening test at the end of the semester. The two tests combined with the diaries were the basis of the evaluation of the VOA online dictation system.Before the analysis, the author had descriptive analysis of the major variables: the pre-and post-listening test scores, and three kinds of data of the VOA online dictation system. They are the total time students spent,the total passages students dictated and the awarded points they obtained. By means of Regression analysis, it is concluded that the awarded points students obtained from the VOA online dictation system explain best the variation between two tests.During the analysis, at first, the author tried to find in what ways VOA online dictation system had improve College Students'listening comprehension by means of diaries. Then, in order to find whether listening comprehension can lead to students'autonomous listening, the author set students'pre-listening test score as the independent variable, and the awarded pointsas the dependent variable analyzing the correlation between those two variables by means of SPSS 15.0. At last, Pair-samples T Test was used to see which group benefites more from the VOA online dictation system, the stronger group or the weaker group.The findings reviewed that the VOA online dictation system has a positive effect especially on students'speech perception, word recognition and long-term memory. Listening comprehnsion can be a motivator for students'autonomous listening on the VOA online dictation system, however, it is not a crucial factor that leads to students'autonomous listening activities on it. Compared with the weaker group, the stronger group seems to benefit more from the VOA online listening.