A Study On The Factors Influencing Difficulty Of Listening Comprehension Test Objective Items Of NMET (Hunan)

Recently, listening has become more and more important in the study of language all over the world. There are many researches about the listening comprehension of TOEFL, IELETS, CET-4/6and TEM4/8. Few of the researches have been done for the National Matriculation English Test (NMET). Almost all of these researches are concentrated on the validity of the listening test and difficulty comparison between different examinations. There are some researches about the factors influencing difficulty of listening comprehension, but most of them just considered some of the single factors. There are few integral analyses of the factors influencing the difficulty of listening comprehension items. In this thesis, the author would like to give an integral analysis on the factors influencing the difficulty of listening comprehension objective items of NMET (Hunan).After reading and comparing the previous researches about listening comprehension, based on the TOEFL listening difficulty predicting indexes structure, the author built a listening comprehension task characteristics model of NMET of Hunan province. Under the guide of the listening comprehension related theory, progressive validity theory and the schemata theory, combining the practical condition of NMET (Hunan) and previous researches about the factors influencing the listening difficulty, the author analyzed the factors that may influence the listening comprehension difficulty of NMET hoping that it will give some help to the controlling of the listening comprehension difficulty and the students’learning of English listening comprehension.This empirical research tries to answer the following three questions:(1) What are the common factors that influence the difficulty of listening comprehension?(2) What are the main factors that influence the English listening comprehension Objective items’difficulty of NMET (Hunan)?(3) How do these main factors influence the English listening comprehension Objective items’difficulty of NMET (Hunan)?Taking the result of2008-2009NMET (Hunan) as the database, the author used the SPSS17.0to do the correlation analysis and regression analysis, and get the conclusion. In this thesis, the author used the correlation analysis firstly to delete some of the variables that have high correlation (higher than.8) with other variables. We use the variables in the model as the independent variables, the correct rate of the listening comprehension of2008-2009NMET (Hunan) results as the dependent variables to do the regression analysis, and get the conclusion that the main factors that influence the difficulty of listening comprehension objective items of NMET (Hunan) are the variables of the interaction of the item and text variables and text variables. A total of five predictors significantly affect the difficulty of the difficulty of NMET (Hunan) listening comprehension objective items. They are the coherence and discourse markers, verifying and constructing meaning, number of negative in correct items, main idea position (if it is in the1st sentence), number of adverbial clause in the text. Among them, the variables: coherence and discourse markers and verifying and constructing meaning affect this special examination’s listening comprehension objective item difficulty most notably.The results of this research will do some help to the difficulty controlling of the listening comprehension in making the examination paper. Also, the results will have some effect on students’improving of the listening comprehension ability.