Effects Of Listeners' Characteristics On Compound Dictation

Compound dictation began to appear in CET4 in 1997 and has been proved to be an efficient tool in measuring students'overall language proficiency. However, all the test results show that most students demonstrate poor abilities while taking compound dictation. In order to improve their performance on compound dictation, it is necessary to identify the factors affecting their listening comprehension. In this thesis, three listener characteristics—language proficiency, background knowledge and language anxiety—are mainly concerned, and the causation of these effects is managed to be analyzed from the psychological process of taking compound dictation. In order to carry out the study, 53 Chinese college students were randomly selected as subjects and divided into two groups according to their scores in CET4. Then they were given listening test and their language anxiety scales were collected at the same time. Both quantitative and qualitative analyses are employed to interpret the results.The study indicates that the students'language proficiency and background knowledge have significant effects on their performance on compound dictation. Generally speaking, the higher the proficiency is, the more familiar with the background knowledge of the testing material, the better the students perform. Moreover, their language anxiety also has a negative correlation with their compound dictation score. This thesis also analyses the resources of the language anxiety, tries to give an explanation from the vision of psychological process of listening, and provides suggestions on how to improve the students'listening comprehension ability by raising their awareness of their cognitive process.