The Effect Of Text Length On Task Difficulty Of English News Listening

English News listening has become more and more important in EFL teaching and assessment. It has been stipulated as required language ability in College English Curriculum Requirements (2007). Many college teachers are already using authentic news from English-speaking countries as the listening materials for the students. And the Internet-based test of College English Test Band 4 and 6 (CET-4, -6) has also increased weighting of English news comprehension in the listening part.However, huge variations in the length of the news exist. Some college students and teachers believe that shorter news is relatively easier to understand than longer news. Does the text length affect the task difficulty of English news listening?Given the paucity of research in this respect, the present study focuses on the factor of text length, to investigate its effect on listening task difficulty by conducting an English listening comprehension test which consists of VOA news reports of three different length categories: 1-min news reports, 3-min news and 5-min news reports.Based on a field study done among 187 randomly selected non-English major freshmen at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, this research finds that listening comprehension of 1-min news is the most difficult for EFL learners, listening comprehension of 5-min news is the easiest and 3-min news is in the middle. And the differences in their difficulty level are significant. Based on the analysis of 184 valid questionnaires, the results suggest that the activation of the schemata would also be significantly affected by the news length; the burden of short-term memory and attention increases as the length of news reports increases. The longer the passages, the relatively easier the activation of the schemata will be, and short-term memory and attention are not leading factors for the subjects in this experiment. In addition, the data from text analysis shows that text length itself does not affect the lexical variation and mean sentence length of news reports, but affects the mean word length and information density, which are the main causes of differences in listening task difficulty in this experiment. The research arrives at implications for the task design and listening material selection in both fields of English language teaching and testing, making tasks and teaching more effective in the interests of practicality.