University English Listening Comprehension Obstacles

Listening is one of the most difficult skills to master inEnglish learning. Listening comprehension, as an input skill, is the basisfor students to develop other lingual skills. In Chinese English teaching,however, much more emphasis has been laid on reading and writing than listeningand speaking for a long period of time. It's a reality that more importancemust be attached to listening comprehension. English teachers in universitieshave to make critical thinking to previous English teaching and actively probeinto new listening teaching mode so as to transform the present situation .The thesis of the article is the obstacle in listening comprehension. Basedon the researches of the previous researchers and combining the practicalsituation in teaching, traditional teaching methods of English teaching willbe critically thought and all kinds of obstacle factors in English listeningcomprehension will be analyzed , as is expected to be used for reference forEnglish teaching in universities. As we have found, there are following two categories of listeningobstacles generally existing in students,I.Lingual factor. Lingual factor means the knowledge of pronunciation ,vocabulary and grammar. Language knowledge is the material basis of listeningcomprehension. The main obstacle in lingual factors comes from incorrectpronunciation and intonation, less vocabulary and complexity of grammarstructure.II.Non-lingual factors. Non-lingual factor mainly includes mental factors,listening skills and strategies, cultural background, etc. Such mentalitiesas fearing difficulties, boredom and no confidence to overcome difficultiesoccur in many students. Because of the misunderstanding of listeningcomprehension, many students believed that successful listening comprehensionis the complete understanding of every word. No doubt, unnecessary excessivepressure will be an obstacle. Definition of the listening strategy: studyingskills ,methods and purposeful activities taken by the students to enhancetheir studying effect. For example, familiarizing sterling Englishpronunciation and intonation, seeing original English film;selectivelyrecording key words and important information. But many students can'teffectively guess the meaning of new words from context. In the course oflistening comprehension, cultural background plays a very important role. Manystudents acknowledged that they knew little about English and Americancultural background. Sometimes, students can't grasp the main idea afterlistening to a passage or a conversation just because of their shortage ofthe corresponding background knowledge.It is the keystone of the article to analyze the obstacle of listeningcomprehension in English teaching and discuss the effective listening strategyso as to eliminate the barriers and enhance listening ability. It's importantfor the students to realize what listening is and cooperate with the teacherin order to get rid of the barriers in their study. And it's also importantfor the teachers to improve teaching techniques so as to get better teachingresults. Teachers should encourage students to build up the confidence toovercome difficulties, use modern multimedia to stimulate the interest of thestudents. In the course of listening teaching, phonetics teaching is essentialbecause information is mainly delivered by phonetical signal. Teachers shouldalso choose all kinds of listening materials such as essays ,dialogue, storiesand news so as to train the students' listening skills and strategies, forexample, guessing the meaning of new words from context, concluding the mainidea, reasoning and predicting according to the known facts, saving time ofmaking note by using abbreviation and symbols, enlarging field of vision andenriching background knowledge by reading English newspapers and magazines ,seeing English films, making full use of resources in Internet.