A Study Of Attention In English Listening Comprehension From A Cognitive Perspective

The concept of attention, which refers to the cognitive resource or mental effortsneeded for certain information process, is an essential aspect of cognitive psychologyand has recently aroused academic interest of Second Language Acquisition (SLA)researchers. The cognitive psychology claims that attention is selective. Therefore, notall given information could enter the cognitive processing of human mind. Due to therestriction of attentional-resource, different cognitive tasks have to compete for thelimited resource and the tasks that do not have enough attentional-resource could notbe completed. When people engage in complicated cognitive tasks, theattentional-resource has to be allocated properly so as to achieve the accomplishmentof various tasks. In addition, the attention process can be classified as consciousattention and automatic attention, as the former consumes attentional-resource and thelatter processes unconsciously without occupation of the resource.English listening comprehension is a complicated cognitive process during whichinformation selection, comprehension, analysis, and task solution take place in turnsand compete for the attentional-resource. As an indispensable means of receivinglanguage input, listening comprehension has great influence on transforming languageinput into output. Therefore the allocation of attentional-resource in the listeningprocess has great significance to the completion of listening comprehension task, tothe improvement of listeningknk proficiency, and even to the general second languageproficiency.This research attempts to reveal how students’ attention functions while they arecompleting listening comprehension tasks, as well as to explore how students applydifferent kinds of listening strategies, especially attentional strategies, when dealingwith different types of listening tasks.The subjects of the experiment are136freshmen from Chengdu University ofTechnology, among whom75major in Resources Exploration and ProspectingEngineering and Civil Engineering. This experiment consists of questionnaires,attention strategy instructions, listening tests before and after the experiment andstudents interviews. The data are collected and analyzed by SPSS software. The major findings of this study are:(1) The students’ level of attention duringeach stage of listening procedure is uneven. They pay more attention to thecompletion of listening tasks than learning how to deal with the tasks.(2) Thestatistics of pre-experimental questionnaire shows that students have a weakawareness of utilizing attentional strategies, but they do have high expectations ofimproving listening proficiency through strategy training.(3) The comparisonbetween pre-experimental and post-experimental results in both groups supports thevalidity of attentional training in improving listening performance.4) Data from thepost-experimental questionnaire and the interviews show that students do employdifferent attentional strategies when dealing with different types of listening tasksafter the attentional training.