On The Improvement Of Listening Proficiency In EFL Class

It is undeniable that listening plays a significant role in language communication and language learning. However, many EFL students fail to fulfill the course requirements due to their inadequate listening competence. To be specific, students cannot identify sounds and words; they are not able to comprehend sentences or discourses; they cannot adopt appropriate listening strategies to compensate for imperfect listening comprehension; they lack necessary background knowledge for listening comprehension. Meanwhile, students'negative affect like low self-esteem and anxiety usually causes ineffective listening comprehension. Hence, English teachers, language experts and education scholars have been long besetting with this problem and meanwhile dedicating their efforts in this regard. So far, some constructive results have been achieved from such different perspectives as psycholinguistics, listening strategy and listening teaching. As for psycholinguistics, many researchers like David W. Carroll,?Dwight Bolinger, domestic researchers like Gui Shichun, Pen Danling have given a specific study about language comprehension. With regard to listening strategy, foreign experts like Oxford, Chamot, and domestic researchers like Wen Qiufang, Cheng Xiaotang, and Pan Shumin have classified learning strategies into certain categories and given a detailed research. As far as listening teaching is concerned, researchers like Michael Rost, Penny Ur have offered meaningful suggestions about teaching listening.It is in the light of those researches that the author of this paper carries out her study in a quest of effective ways to help the students who are tussling with listening problems. Hence, the author first reviews nature of listening, features of listening, and listening process in English learning. In a word, listening is an active and complex psychological process in which listeners apply their language knowledge and prior background knowledge to construct meaning according to the received acoustic signals. The author regards the listening process as four interrelated levels, i.e., sound identification, word recognition, sentence comprehension and discourse comprehension; then she probes into the factors in the linguistic aspects affecting listening comprehension, such as sounds, words, sentence structure and grammar, and non-linguistic aspects, such as background information, listening strategy and affective factors.?Last the author attempts to explore ways to improve students'listening competence through language knowledge improvement, listening strategy training, enriching background knowledge and affective problem solving.