A Study On The Influences Of The Difficulty Factors Of Listening Comprehension Test Of NMET In The View Of Cognitive Load Theory

Listening is a process which involves a continuum of active processes that are under the control of the listener and passive processes that are out of the control of the listener(Rost,2005).English listening is important for most of the students because of its practical usage in international communication.It is vital for us to find the factors that affect the difficulty of listening texts.Cognitive load is a kind of psychological activity amount which is put on an individual cognitive system in a certain working time(Sweller,1988).Students' cognitive load in the process of learning means students' consciousness and experience to the learning task,responsibility and time pressure.If students use more mental resources and energy to understand the listening materials,the cognitive load will be heavy.If students can use the schema easily and automatically,the cognitive load will be low.This study is to find the factors affecting listening difficulty to reduce students' cognitive load when doing listening.The thesis is designed to answer the following questions:What are the main factors that influence the students' listening comprehension ? How does cognitive load affect the factors of listening difficulty of NMET? The research is carried out on the teachers and students of Ganzhou Middle School.And the questionnaires for students and teachers are designed in the aspect of three parts which are related to cognitive load.Interviews of students and teachers are carried out,and the mp3 s of the listening texts are studied to find the factors affecting listening difficulty.Listening tests of NMET(2013-2016)are done on students of senior two and senior three to get the data of the difficulty of the tests.400 copies of questionnaires for students are handed out and 23 teachers finish answering questions.Data are collected in the form of Excel to calculate the number of the different choices related to listening difficulty.Cognitive load measurement rating is carried out in 50 students,and the contents are got from the above-mentioned analysis.The following results are found in the view of cognitive load in the research.Firstly,in the aspect of task characteristics,the most difficult factors of the listening materials which can affect students are the vocabulary,the speech rate and the pronunciation in which liaison and accents are stressed.In addition,the length of thelistening text can affect the difficulty of listening greatly.Secondly,in the aspect of the listeners' characteristics,students' learning background which belongs to students' previous experience and students' motivation of learning English are the important factors which can affect the difficulty of listening.Thirdly,in the aspect of the interactivity of the above-mentioned two factors,students' listening habits and anxiety are the important factors that can influence the difficulty of listening.In the thesis,the questionnaires of the students and the teachers can be better designed if more time is given.At the same time,the number of the teachers is not enough and the teachers and students are all from Ganzhou Middle School,which is limited for study.The analysis of the data is simple and the methods of analyzing data can be varied.It is hoped that the research can give some possible suggestions to the people who are interest in English listening study.