A Study On The Relationship Between The Sensitivity In Phonological Production And Perception And The Achievement Of Listening Comprehension

Listening comprehension is the main route for students to acquire the knowledge in English learning with the other basic skills as speaking?reading and writing.However,when learning the pronunciation or speaking of a second language,the learners usually are affected by the negative transfer of the pronunciation habits from their mother tongue with the errors of phonological perception and production.Researches have shown that phonological perception is closely associated with that of production.The evidence came from the studies of the different aspects of language perception and language production including tones in Mandarin and dialects.There are linguistic factors and non-linguistic factors that may impact listening comprehension.Among the language factors,phonetic units play a basic role.Though phonological perception and production are found to have impacts on the achievement of English listening comprehension,the correlation of the three dimensions remains unknown.The most important question is whether phonological perception,production and listening comprehension share the homogeneity of the correlation.The present study took students of a junior school in Fuzhou as subjects and investigated how phonological perception and production influence listening comprehension.Three specific research questions were put forward as follows.1)Is there any difference between high-level listening comprehension group and that of low-level group in phonological perception and phonological production?2)Are phonological perception and phonological production related to listening comprehension?3)To what degree can phonological perception and phonological production predict the variance of the achievement of listening comprehension?The research enjoyed the following findings:First,the high-level achievement of listening comprehension was related to higher level of phonological perception and phonological production.Second,there was a significant positive correlation between phonological perception and production and listening test score.Third,phonological perception could predict more variance of the achievements of listening comprehension than phonological production.The present research revealed the relationship between phonological perception,phonological production and listening comprehension and gave some theoretical implications to English teaching.