A Study Of The Listening Process Of Chinese EFL Students: From The Perspective Of Dual Coding Theory

Due to the importance of listening comprehension among the four basic foreign/second language skills, considerable attention has been given to the exploration of listening process and how to improve EFL's listening comprehension. However, theories on listening like bottom-up theories, top-down theories, and schema theory can partly explain the process of listening, and most of them put emphasis on linguistic factors in the listening process rather than non-linguistic factors.Different from other listening theories, Dual Coding Theory takes listening as a cognitive activity mediated by two independent but partly interconnected symbolic systems specialized for encoding, organizing, storing, and retrieving stimulus information. One is the image (or imagery) system, and the other is the verbal system. Based on this theory, this thesis conducted two empirical studies on the application and role of Dual Coding Theory in English listening process in order to better understand the listening process of Chinese EFL learners and find more strategies to promote EFL's listening comprehension.Forty freshmen from Shandong College of Art and Design are selected as the subjects of the study. Quantitative analytical methods are adopted to answer the research questions focusing on what the differences are between the participants evoking more mental images and affective responses and those evoking fewer mental images and affective responses in understanding and remembering the text, what the differences are between boys and girls in forming mental images and affective responses and in understanding and remembering the text and in different text types (narrative, expository and argumentative texts), whether concrete texts are more comprehensible, more interesting and can be better recalled than abstract texts.It has been found that in the listening process there are significant differences between the participants evoking more mental images and affective responses and those evoking fewer mental images and affective responses in understanding and remembering the text, the participants evoking more mental images and affective responses can understand and recall the text better than those evoking fewer mental images and affective responses; there are significant differences between boys and girls in forming mental images and affective responses, girls can form more mental images and evoke more affective responses than boys, which results in their better understanding and recall of the text than boys' and concrete texts are more comprehensible and can be better recalled than abstract texts in different text types (narrative, expository and argumentative texts).Based on the main findings of the study, this thesis then discusses its pedagogical implications by providing some suggestions for the teaching of English listening. Limitations of the study and suggestions for future research are finally provided.