Investigation Research On The Relationship Between Students' Visual Impairment Degree And English Listening Comprehension

With the progress in material and spiritual civilization, the disables and the vulnerables have attracted worldwide attention since the latter half of the 20 th century. In the field of education, special education is being paid more and more attention to by the central government. Teaching English for the visually impaired is the needs that improve the degree of civilization of modern society. Whether in human communication activities, or in the process of language learning, listening occupies a very important position and plays an important part. It is the foundation of speaking, reading and writing. The general goal of English curriculum issued in English Curriculum Standards of Compulsory Education is: teaching English to cultivate students' abilities in using English language. Language skills are the important parts of language use abilities, in which listening and reading are receptive input skills, while speaking and writing are productive output skills. For the visually impaired(VI) students, language input as the necessary source of language studying, listening would be more easily achieved than reading. Listening comprehension is indeed, however, a complicated psychological process of meaning construction, essentially comprising the listener actively on sound information or the acoustic signal selection, interpretation and storage. Listening comprehension is an important ability in language learning, meanwhile, owing to the blocked visual channel for information, VI students would have much more difficulties in learning it. In the school for the blind, fortunately, due to the visual impairment, there exists sensory compensation phenomenon, that is, the VI's auditory and tactile organs are found to be more sensitive, and are hoped to enhance the defect compensation. On the other hand, from the language development characteristics of VI children, many foreign researchers found that the acquisition of language is primarily dependent on auditory rather than visual. Visual disability itself, so to speak, does not affect the development of children's language. However, visual input is yet to be one of the important modes for receiving information, and obviously, the degree of visual impairment would still have a significant blemish on their learning. The present study sought to investigate two variables as: VI students' visual impairment degrees and their English listening comprehension achievements. Therefore, the following two questions are explored: 1) Do visual impairment degrees of the students influence their achievements of English listening comprehension? 2) What is the correlation between their VI degrees and their achievements of English listening comprehension?According to the demographical information reported by the participants, there are 40 students in Grade 8 in Guangzhou School for the Visually Impaired, ranged from 13 to 15 in age, with 20 blind and 20 low- visioned. The gender ratio is 1:1 with 20 boys and 20 girls. Most of them have interest and motivations in English learning. The subjects are assigned to four groups: Blind level 1(B1), Blind level 2(B2), Low Vision level 1(LV1) and Low Vision level 2(LV2). During one academic year, 8 listening tests were held to measure the periodical results of the investigation. One-way ANOVA and Pearson Correlation Coefficient tests were used to verify the obtained data. The results and data collected in the tests and interviews indicate that there is a significant difference between VI students' VI degrees and their English listening achievements. The B1 students' scores tend to be higher than the LV1 students', and the differences are significant. The other subject groups did not perform significantly different in a statistical sense. There is no significant relationship between visual impairment degree difference and English listening comprehension achievements. Besides, there is a negative relationship between students' visual impairment degrees and English listening comprehension achievements. This means that the deeper degrees of visual impairment they have, the higher listening test scores the VI students might get. The results of the research indicate that the different degrees of visual impairment only have certain kind of interference effect on students' English listening comprehension achievements. It implies that the different degrees of visual impairment have little influence on listening comprehension. This explains why human beings do subconsciously close their eyes when they try to concentrate on listening. And thus, Pavlov's theory of the excitation is proved correct again.The author also interviews some individual VI students. The status quo of their English listening comprehension are analyzed and explained in the light of their cognitive and learning characteristics in the learning of English, as well as with their visual impairment and environmental factors and other aspects. The implications of this research in theory and teaching are described, and the limitations of this study and the suggestions for further research are put forward for information. It is helpful for the further study of foreign language teaching for the students with visual impairment.