| In the College English Curriculum Requirements, the requirements for undergraduate college English teaching are set at three levels, i.e., basic requirements, intermediate requirements, and higher requirements. In the trial implementation of requirements in 2003 and 2004, the intermediate requirements required college students"to understand longer English radio and TV programs produced in China on familiar topics, grasping the main ideas, key points and relevant details". The higher requirements required that"they should, by and large, be able to understand radio and TV programs produced in English-speaking countries". However, in 2007 (final version), the intermediate requirements required that"students should generally be able to follow talks and lectures in English, to understand longer English radio and TV programs on familiar topics, grasping the main ideas, key points and relevant details"but without mentioning whether the English programs were produced in China or abroad. In addition, in the Internet-Based College English Test, English programs from home and abroad are both utilized as the sources of listening test materials. This may stimulate intense interests in the question whether there is any listening comprehension difficulty difference in English news reports from home and abroad.China Daily (CHD) and VOA were selected as the representatives for English news reports from home and abroad respectively. Two news corpora-CHD corpus and VOA corpus were constructed. The comparative analysis of text features between CHD and VOA was made from four aspects: phonological, lexical, syntactic and propositional features. The standardized type/token ratio, average word length, average sentence length etc. were obtained by using Wordsmith Tools 4.0. The proportions of high frequency word in each corpus were obtained by using VocabProfile computer program. By calculation, the average speech rate and information density of each corpus were obtained. It is found that in terms of word length and lexical variation, there is no significant difference between the two; in terms of speech rate, word frequency and syntactic complexity, CHD is more difficult than VOA; in terms of propositional, VOA is more difficult than CHD.In order to explore whether there is any difficulty difference in listening comprehension between CHD and VOA news reports, listening comprehension test was administrated by using the listening materials from CHD corpus and VOA corpus (3 from CHD and 3 from VOA). It is found that CHD listening comprehension is significantly easier than VOA. To explain this finding from the perspective of text features, efforts were made to control the effect of item difficulty upon the test result. Test materials were analyzed and the topic familiarity was explored by means of the questionnaire survey. The results show that no significant differences exist between CHD test texts and VOA test texts in respect of word length, discourse length, discourse type and discourse organization; CHD test texts are more difficult than VOA test texts in terms of speech rate, lexical variation, word frequency and syntax; VOA test texts are more difficult than CHD test texts in terms of propositional. This result is generally in line with the result of corpora text analysis.This paper concludes that the propositional difficulties, especially the topic familiarity and information density, are the primary causes of the listening comprehension difficulty differences between CHD and VOA news reports while the linguistic difficulty is secondary.The present study provides useful information for selecting listening materials with appropriate difficulty level and assigning listening comprehension task in a reasonable manner for language learners, teachers, textbook compilers and language test developers.
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