The Relationship Between Phonological Awareness And Listening Comprehension Among Adult Chinese EFL Learners

Phonological awareness(PA),a unique precursor accounting for individual differences in early reading and spelling achievement in alphabetic languages,has been highlighted in academia of Latin alphabets.PA's effect on reading achievement has been observed in both first language acquisition and second language acquisition.Important correlation has been found between speech perception and phonemic awareness.Moreover,researchers' focus has shifted from children to adult learners such as college students.Recently,PA has been discovered significantly related to the listening comprehension among Chinese EFL children in an English-immersion program(Li,Cheng,&Kirby,2012).However,the role of PA on listening comprehension among adult students remains an open question.Aims to establish whether phonological awareness correlates with listening comprehension among adult Chinese EFL learners,the present study tested both undergraduates and postgraduate students on relevant constructs.Thirty-five adult participants in this study were volunteer students mainly from two universities in Beijing,who were language majors and sports majors.Tests consisted of listening comprehension,blending task,segmenting task,deletion task and non-word spelling task.Participants' uneven performance revealed large room for improvement in both listening comprehension and phonological awareness.Overall,positive pairwise correlations were found in the adult Chinese EFL learners among listening comprehension,nonword spelling and phonological awareness.Phonological awareness illustrated an indirect relation to listening comprehension through nonword spelling.The performance of PA tasks and non-word spelling task were then compared between above-average,average and below-average listeners classified according to the listening comprehension test.The results of regression analyses indicated a bidirectional significant correlation between phonological awareness and listening comprehension among average and less-skilled students.