A Survey On The Phonological Awareness And Listening Comprehension Of Senior High School Students Of Different Genders

Psychologists and educational theorists from all over the world hold a consensus on the gender difference in language learning between male and female students in the relevant investigations and studies.It was generally believed that there has been obvious gender difference in language learning,and females were generally considered to be superior to males.In English learning,females are better than males in listening,speaking,reading and writing.As the primary of the four Basic English skills,listening plays an important role in English learning.Females' listening performance is often better than that of males'.Many scholars have studied this phenomenon.At present,most of the research focuses on gender difference of non-intellectual factors,such as listening strategies,listening expectations,but there is no study of gender difference in the listening from the internal mechanism of listening.Through the combing of the listening comprehension process,we found that the real cause of the gender difference in listening comprehension may be the gender difference in phonological awareness.Phonological awareness is the ability of controlling and perceiving phonemes and other phonological units.It is a metalinguistic ability.It develops independently of four Basic English skills,but it is further strengthened and developed through four Basic English skills.Research on phonological awareness and linguistic competence has been a very active field.Most studies have confirmed that phonological awareness is positively correlated with various linguistic abilities,but no research has been conducted to link this finding with gender difference.This study will attempt to design experimental tasks to study the causes of gender difference in listening comprehension based on previous research.This paper intends to answer the following questions [1]:(1)Does gender difference exist in phonological awareness and is there a difference between dimensions of phonological awareness in terms of degree?(2)Is the gender difference in listening comprehension related to gender difference in phonological awareness?(3)Do different dimensions of phonological awareness produce the same effect on their listening comprehension?The participants of this study are Senior One students from a class in a senior high school in Ningde,Fujian Province.55 valid test papers were retrieved,including 30 male students and 25 female students.In order to answer the questions raised in this paper,two tasks were carried out in the senior high school where the participants were in;the experimental method was mainly test method.This research used two indicators,namely,English phonological awareness and English listening comprehension.Therefore,the tasks of this test were:(1)Phonological Awareness Test(see Appendix I).(2)Collection of Listening Achievements.Among them,the phonological awareness test papers were revised and formulated based on phonological awareness test papers of Lewkowicz(1980: 245)and Li(2012)and this study collected the listening scores of the participants in three English examinations,and then took the average as the listening scores of each student.In order to test participants' phonological awareness,the present study adopted phonological awareness paper to assess the participants' phonological awareness.Phonological awareness consisted of three parts,syllable awareness,onset-rhyme awareness and phoneme awareness;therefore,the measurement of phonological awareness was also composed of these three parts.After the phonological awareness test,the students' phonological awareness scores were calculated and the students' phonological awareness scores were matched with the listening scores.The data was analyzed by SPSS and the relevant conclusions were drawn.The conclusions are as follows.(1)The result of the present study suggested that gender difference did exist in phonological awareness.Both in the overall level of phonological awareness and in the specific dimension of phonological awareness,females were stronger than males.Gender differences in different dimensions of phonological awareness were different.Among them,gender difference in syllable awareness was the largest,followed by phoneme,and gender difference in onset-rime awareness was the smallest.(2)Present study probed into the relationship between phonological and listening comprehension.First of all,there was a close relationship between phonological awareness and listening comprehension,and different dimensions of phonological awareness had different influences on listening comprehension,and there was gender difference in the influence of phonological awareness on listening comprehension.The proficiency of female phonological awareness was stronger than that of male,and the influence of female phonological awareness on listening comprehension was stronger than that of male.(3)In general,either male or female,their phonological awareness had a significant correlation with listening comprehension,and phonological awareness had a strong predictive ability on listening comprehension,while the correlation between female phonological awareness and listening scores was more significant than that of males,and the predictive power of phonological awareness on listening comprehension was stronger than that of male,that is to say,the gender difference in English listening comprehension was indeed related to gender difference in phonological awareness.This study gave a general description of the relationship between phonological awareness and listening comprehension of males and females.The findings have some implications for foreign language teaching.The results of this research showed that phonological awareness had a significant effect on listening comprehension and the intrinsic influencing factor of the gender difference in listening comprehension was gender difference in phonological awareness.Therefore,in order to improve students' listening comprehension ability,we should start with improving students' phonological awareness.And phoneme awareness had the strongest influence on listening comprehension.Therefore,teachers should pay more attention to improving students' sense of phoneme to achieve the best effect of improving listening comprehension..In order to reduce the gender difference in listening comprehension,teachers should start with improving phonological awareness and use different methods to improve the different genders' phonological awareness in order to achieve the teaching purpose of narrowing the gender difference in listening comprehension.