An Empirical Study On The Correlation Between L2 Listening Comprehension And Attention

Listening comprehension is one of the most important aspects for language learning. It is indeed a complicated mental process including information selection, interpretation and storage. The process of listening comprehension can be affected by many factors, among which cognitive factors play a more crucial role. Nowadays, cognitive factors have attracted interests of more and more linguists in the field of listening comprehension. Attention is one of these cognitive factors. With the help of attention, people can select information in input and ignore the distractions. Therefore, during listening comprehension, attention plays an essential role. However, up till now, there are limited researches concentrating on the relationship between attention and listening comprehension. Moreover, most of the existing studies are theoretical ones; empirical studies haven't been placed enough emphasis on.On the basis of psycholinguistics, this paper aims to identify the role of attention in L2 listening comprehension with an empirical method. In this study, listening comprehension is divided into three sub-skills, namely, listening for topics, listening for the details and listening for inferences. These three aspects are analyzed respectively.Attention test in this study is operated by E-PRIME. After the scores of listening comprehension and attention are collected, software SPSS 16.0 is applied to data analysis. Conclusions of present study are listed as follows:(1)There is correlation between focused attention and divided attention to some extent; (2) L2 listening comprehension is correlated with attention, and for the sub-skills of listening comprehension, attention has more influence on the skill of listening for topics than that of listening for details, but there is no evidence for the correlation between attention and the skill of listening for inferences; (3) For the attentional strategies, efficient listeners rely on both focused attention and divided attention, while less efficient listeners depend on focused attention rather than divided attention.