The Enlightenment Of L2 Learners' Self-Perceived Obstacles In English Listening Comprehension

As a linguistic skill, listening comprehension (LC) is of great importance in both our daily communication and L2 learning. It is widely acknowledged that it can contribute to developing the learners' overall language abilities and facilitating their communication. However, for a long period of time, the teaching of English in China has mainly focused on the teaching of reading and writing in the early stage of learning and neglected the teaching of listening and speaking. Many teachers are puzzled at the situation in the English class, though many students can get a good mark in English test, not all of them can perform well in listening and speaking. The reform of College English Test Band 4 and 6 attaches great importance to cultivating college students' communicative competence. Listening occupies a comparatively larger percentage in the new test form. How to improve the students' listening abilities becomes the focus again. So the teachers reflect on what was wrong with the teaching and try to find out the solutions to these problems, and the learners also have long been making great efforts to improve their listening abilities, but very little effect is produced.Since the 1980s, many western researchers (Oxford; Rost; O'Malley, etc.) have made great contributions to define and classify LC strategies, to identify the differences between effective and less effective strategies. Chinese scholars (Liu Shaolong, Wang Yu, etc.) have also conducted some empirical researches on LC strategies and contributed a lot to Chinese English teaching and researching. However, these studies are done from the researchers' perspectives. Researches that investigate listening comprehension obstacles from the learner's perspectives have been rare.On the ground of the combination of the studies of many linguistics works and years of experience in the teaching of listening, this thesis has reported a study on L2 learners' self-perceived obstacles in listening comprehension, and the relationship between self-perceived obstacles and listening comprehension scores. 83 students, first-year non-English majors from Qingdao Ocean Shipping Marine College, who entered the college in 2007, took part in the study. They answered a questionnaire designed by the researcher respectively two months after they entered the college, and took the listening comprehension test one week after that. The major findings of the study are summarized as follows:1. Arranged in the order of difficulty degree, the five most common self-perceived obstacles in L2 listening comprehension were: obstacles in vocabulary (OV); obstacles in listening comprehension strategies and skills (OLCS); obstacles in identifying speech sound (OSS); obstacles in understanding speech of a faster delivery rate (OSR); and obstacles caused by unfamiliarity with the intonation, stress and rhythm of speech (OISR).2. There were significantly negative correlations between the listening comprehension scores and the self-perceived obstacles. The correlation coefficients were all negative, ranging from -.290 to -.449.3. Self-perceived obstacles could predict the listening comprehension scores at a significant level. They can explain 25 percent of the variance in comprehension scores. Only obstacles in vocabulary (OV) could serve as significant variable in predicting listening comprehension scores.The study enables us to get a clear picture of L2 students' self-perceived obstacles in EFL listening comprehension, and their relationship with listening comprehension scores. By providing opportunities for learners to report in their own words, teachers may gain some insights into their understanding of students' obstacles and may offer better help to the students. The obstacles perceived by the students mainly lie in vocabulary, listening comprehension strategies and skills, speech sound, speech rate, and speech characteristics. And vocabulary obstacle ranked the first. The result suggests that enlarging listening vocabulary be of primary importance in improving students' listening comprehension ability. The inverse relationship between students' self-perceived obstacles and listening comprehension scores reveals that self- perceived obstacles, to a certain extent, can reflect students' real obstacles in listening comprehension. And these self-perceived obstacles should be attached great importance and overcome first. However, not all the obstacles could be perceived by students themselves. Teachers should help the students to realize some other obstacles.To sum up, both teachers and learners are important roles in the teaching of listening. We should devote to explore corresponding strategies to eliminating the obstacles that L2 students either self-perceived or not in listening comprehension. For the part of students, their job is to build confidence to meet the challenge, to get a correct idea of the nature of listening comprehension, to master some effective listening skills to smooth away the obstacles in listening. For the part of teachers, improving the teaching methods and skills, enhancing the quality of the listening classes are the crucial factors to achieve success in the teaching of listening. Teachers should encourage students to build confidence to overcome the obstacles in listening; they should make good use of the multi-media to present the listening materials and arouse the students' interest. They should select different types of listening materials to train specific listening skills, such as guessing the new words from the context, finding the main idea, making inference and prediction, building background knowledge and taking notes in the form of abbreviations and symbols, etc.