A Study On The Effect Of Reduced Forms On English Listening Comprehension

Listening is a complex cognitive process, following bottom-up and top-down processing models (Richards,1990), going through three phases of perception, parsing and utilization (Anderson,1995) and needing the synergy of four mechanisms, including neurology, linguistics, semantics and pragmatics (Rost,2011). Pronunciation decoding is the first step of bottom-up processing, perception and linguistic decoding. In other words, listening starts from pronunciation decoding. The difficulty of linguistic decoding lies in the extensive existence of reduced forms in authentic materials, such as liaison, elision and assimilation (Khaghaninezhad & Jafarzadeh,2014). Under the background of computer assisted language teaching, researchers start to study on the effect of reduced forms instruction with textual aids, like captions, subtitles and transcript (Grgurovie & Hegelheimer,2007; Maleki & Rad, 2011; Yang & Chang,2014). The thesis will further explore the effectiveness and feasibility of conducting reduced forms instruction with textual aids in domestic classrooms.The study recruits 90 sophomore students from Shandong Foreign Trade Vocational College. They come from three parallel classes of English major. They are divided into three groups. The experiment is carried out for eight weeks, including two tests (pretest and posttest) and six-week training. During the training, subjects will be provided with different modes of textual aids. Group one is the control group, with no textual aids during the whole training process, while Group two and Group three are experimental groups with full-text transcript and annotated full-text transcript respectively. The annotation refers to the symbols marked on reduced forms. Besides, there were no textual aids provided during the two tests.With the help of SPSS 16.0, the results show that three groups all have achieved a better performance after six-week training. However, the improvement is different. Different modes of textual aids have a differential influence on enhancing listening comprehension. The mode of annotated full-text transcript is the most effective. What’s more, the study has categorized the question items into two types:the first type assesses the general listening comprehension while the second type focuses on the acquisition of reduced forms. Results show that full-text transcript without annotation can also assist improving listening comprehension, but not as impressive as annotated full-text transcript. The reduced forms instruction has a positive correlation with listening comprehension enhancement. Therefore, it is necessary to mark symbols on the base of visual and verbal stimulation to strengthen the visual stimulation. By this way, the visual stimulation can be strengthened to attach learners’ attention. With better taking in and memory, learners can segment the flow of speech more automatically and improving listening comprehension ability as native-like as possible.The thesis has provided a new idea for improving listening comprehension and feasible pedagogical suggestions for overcoming listening difficulties. The study has the following significance:a). It proves the effectiveness and feasibility of reduced forms instruction with textual aids on enhancing listening comprehension with empirical study. Suggestions on teaching method are also provided for teachers and students; b). By introducing frontier research perspective, the study will inspire domestic researchers to further explore feasible and effective teaching method and strategies for overcoming all elements that hinder listening comprehension.