The Effects Of Reading Aloud On Non-English Major College Students’ Listening Comprehension Ability

With the development of science and technology, listening skills for non-native Englishlearners are more and more important. There are four skills in learning a foreign language:listening, speaking, reading, and writing, listening is the most common one. Listening is alsoconsidered as an essential part in foreign language teaching. According to reform of CET4,and the requirements of syllabus, English teaching should focus on the cultivation of students’ability of reading, listening, writing and speaking, while for many college students, listeningcomprehension is a very difficult part. Listening is the foundation of communication, becauseit is a very important source of language input in foreign language learning, and plays a keyrole in foreign language learning. Therefore, teachers and students paid more and moreattention to listening teaching. At present, in our country, English listening teaching still existmany problems, students can’t identify the familiar words, phrases and even the sentences atthe same moment of listening, but recognize them easily when looking at the typescripts. Inthis paper, the author analyzed the problems existing in listening teaching, and researched onrelevant theories, such as: the nature and the definition of reading aloud, and through analyzedthe process and the nature of listening comprehension, the author pointed out that sounddiscrimination is the key to listening comprehension, and discussed the important role and theworking principle of sound discrimination system in the phase of sound discrimination.Reading aloud is a form of multi-senses input and output, it promotes the development andthe perfection of sound discrimination system through self-sound discrimination, and torealize the conversion of the sound discrimination system and character recognition system,so as to promote the improvement of listening comprehension ability.To begin with, this paper put forward the problems existed in listening teaching, andemphasized the importance of listening, which provided basis for the purpose of the research.Secondly, in literature review, the article described the nature and the process of reading aloud,the special language movement of reading aloud in detail, and then analyzed and discussedthe nature and the process of listening comprehension, in addition, made the conclusion thatthe process of listening comprehension is an active process, listeners will analyze what theyhave heard, select and reconstruct the information later, meanwhile, they associate theinformation with the knowledge in their memory, the article analyzed the working principle ofthe sound discrimination system, then combined with the nature and the characteristics ofreading aloud, and found out that reading aloud play an active role in promoting listening comprehension ability.The third chapter is the experimental research, the author put forward two hypothesesfirst, in order to investigate the situation of reading aloud, there are74survey questionnaireswere distributed to74students, who majored in software engineering in a University in LiaoNing province. After the investigation, the author chose60students to take part in theexperiment, and divided them into two groups. In order to prove that there is no difference onphonetics and reading aloud ability between the students in two groups, the author carried outthe same phonetics and listening tests for the two groups before the experiment. The results ofthe tests showed that there is no significant difference between the students in two groups onreading aloud ability and listening comprehension ability. But after two-month training on theexperimental group, the phonetics posttest and the listening posttest were carried out on bothgroups, then analyzed the data collected from the tests, the data indicated that the phoneticability and listening comprehension ability of the students in experimental group wereimproved in different extent, and better than the controlled group. This explained that it ishelpful to improve the students’ listening comprehension ability through enhancing thephonetic ability and grasp the skills of reading aloud.In the end, the article elaborated the major findings of this study, and concluded thatreading aloud has important practical significance on listening teaching and improvingstudents’ listening comprehension ability. At the same time, the author also gave a verydetailed explanation on some factors, which may affect the results of the experiment, and putforward some rationalization proposals for future research. Reading aloud is a reading skill,which use multi-senses during reading, it is a form of dual input of reading and speaking,looking and listening, it can enhance the improvement of listening comprehension ability, andcan guide students to carry on correct pronunciation, it is better than the traditional listeningteaching method.