An Investigation Into Phonetic Instructions In College English Listening

With the English listening and speaking abilities of the non-English majors, especially such abilities of the science and engineering students, becoming more and more emphasized, the problem of how to efficiently teach a college English listening class has been explored by educators all over the country. In the author's point of view, before a still better way of how to improve the students' listening ability is found, the main problems in their English study and the weakness in their teachers' teaching, have to be discovered at first.From the point of phonetic knowledge acquisition, the author of this thesis conducted two questionnaire-based investigations into the problems existing in both the students' English listening study and the teachers' teaching of English listening. In the process of the investigations, two sets of questionnaires, 150 sheets of each, were distributed to the 150 research subjects, all of whom were sophomores of science and engineering at university; and 147 valid responses were recollected. After the analysis on the results of the questionnaires it was found that the students' mastery of the basic phonetic knowledge was so poor, and at the same time the problem of the English teachers' insufficient instruction in the phonetic knowledge had come in sight. With this result, the author's conclusion was that college English teachers should impart a bit more basic phonetic knowledge instructions to their students in listening class.Meanwhile, to test if the teaching of the basic phonetic knowledge works in improving science and engineering students' listening ability, the author did a quasi-experiment on the effectiveness of explicit phonetic instruction in improving the students' listening proficiency. In the experiment, two classes of science and engineering freshmen were enrolled and were classified into an experimental class and a control class, consisting of 62 and 65 students respectively. For the experiment and at the initial stage, a pre-experiment listening test was given to all the research subjects. Through the statistical analysis on the scores of the pre-test, it was found that no significant difference had existed between the two, which meant the two separate classes had just been standing at a similar English listening level before the phonetic...