Analysis And Application Of Expressions In Decoding English Listening Comprehension

English learners and teachers have long been troubled by how to improve English listening skills. In most cases students may be able to identify each word they are listening,but they may not be able to store a sufficient number of words in their working memory so that they fail to understand the meaning. Even if they master a lot of basic vocabulary, many students still hardly get the key point during the listening comprehension process, so it is critical to find an effective solution to this problem.The article discusses the nature and features of listening comprehension from the perspective of cognitive theory so as to prove the feasibility and unique advantages of expressions in decoding process. The article applies the theory of Anderson(1985), that is listening comprehension consists of three interrelated and cyclical processes: perceptual processing, parsing and utilization.The attention is paid on the feasibility of using expressions to parse phonetic strings. Expression is the clause framework with specific vacancy which has to be filled by different fillers. Based on the above analysis, the authors carried out the following empirical studySubjects were freshmen from Yanbian University, who were randomly divided into two classes, the experimental group (33 students), the control group (34 students). Listening parts of 2010 Beijing college entrance test was used to do the pretest in order to know the level of all subjects in the listening competence. The comparative experiment was conducted for 11 weeks, only the experimental class received the instruction of expressions and the ways of decoding in their English listening comprehension class, the most important thing is to teach students how to parse known information and unknown information.SPSS16.0 statistical software was used to analyze results after the two tests. The analysis showed that there was a strong positive relationship between expressions and English listening comprehension; expressions play an important role in the English listening comprehension process. If students can master enough expressions as well as decoding ways of expressions, focusing on the unknown information during the limited listening comprehension time; applying the characteristic of expressions, that is, the largest storage and retrieval unit, to expand the working memory capacity, then applying semantics functions of expressions to improve the accuracy of English listening comprehension during utilization, to improve the listening comprehension skills ultimately.