A Correlational Study On The Explicit Instruction Of English Phonological Awareness And Listening Competence Development In College Efl Context

An abundant studies home and aboard have provided sufficient evidence thatphonological awareness correlates with several linguistic abilities and its intervention andinstruction bears significant effects on the learners. Recently, a growing number ofresearchers in china also began to focus on the influence of phonological awareness on thedevelopment of Chinese and English as a foreign language. However, most studies in thisfield have taken preschool or lower grade children as subjects. Moreover, the mainconcerns are usually about its effects on acquisition and development of linguistic abilitiessuch as reading, spelling and word learning, and its correlation with these abilities.Exploration concerning its correlation with listening ability and the specific methodologyto conduct its intervention seems rather limited. In this sense, the author of the dissertationchooses college students as subjects and attempts to conduct a short-term systematicexplicit instruction of phonological awareness to them in order to find out its correlationwith listening development and the feasibility of developing listening ability throughexplicit instruction. In addition, the study aims to provide a new perspective for thecollege English listening teaching practice.It is basically a quasi-experimental research composed of both quantitative and qualitativeresearch methods. Instruments used in the research include a written questionnaire, groupinterviews, pre-tests and post-tests on PA and listening comprehension. The softwareExcel 2000 and SPSS 13.0 were also used in data analysis. The experiment wasadministered in two intact classes of freshmen at Liren College. The two groups weretaught by the researcher and another English teacher respectively.The theoretical framework of the study consists of three theories: listeningdevelopment, explicit instruction and language transfer. After fourteen works ofexperiment, the result shows that the experimental group has made significantimprovement in PA, indicating that the explicit instruction is feasible in promoting PA incollege students. The experimental group has made greater progress in the listeningcomprehension than the control group, which suggests that PA instruction plays a role infacilitating listening improvement. But the degree of the listening progress is lower than that made in PA. In addition, the correlation between PA and listening comprehensionturns out to be a relatively weak one, showing that the PA and listening ability are notdeveloping at the same pace.The findings of the research might be helpful to college English teachers and teachersof other educational levels. College English teachers who are interested in improvingstudent’s listening ability could design the course in reference to the syllabus provided inthe study. English teachers of the lower level, middle school teachers in particular, couldalso apply similar teaching section to classroom so as to lay a good foundation forstudent’s transfer to college. The author also hopes that this paper could draw specialattention from the experts in EFL teaching and compilers specialized in college Englishlistening, so that PA instruction could gain its independent place in college Englisheducational system in China. Therefore, the information obtained from the research couldserve as reference or support to future research.