A Research On Knowledge Factors Affecting Conversational Listening Comprehension

Listening is one of the major tools for information acquisition. Nevertheless, for non-English majors, listening is deemed as the hardest skill, and it is considered to be a passive process---listening passively instead of actively inputting and initiatively comprehending. In order to convert passive course into active information processing, students need to activate the existing language and background schemata, which emphasizes the significance of schema accumulation. The thesis aims to acknowledge knowledge factors affecting students'listening comprehension and to propose pertinent suggestions for teaching and learning.The thesis takes exploration of knowledge factors as the topic. By both quantitative and qualitative methods, the author conducts data collection by empirical experiment, questionnaire and interview, probing and analyzing the existing knowledge factors for 122 non-English majors in two classes randomly selected from grade 2010 of XiJing College. The data collection lasts one semester from March,2011 to September,2011. By the research, the author explores the existing knowledge factors, including phonetic, lexical, grammatical and background factors, among which, lexical factor, with the proportion to 45.82%, ranks first. And the thesis raises some possible methods by strengthening schemata accumulation and activation for overcoming these knowledge factors.All in all. knowledge factors play important role in conversational listening comprehension, schema accumulation is conducive to improving listening ability and facilitates listening teaching.