An Analysis Into The Effecrs Of Phonetic Training On NCcollege Students' Llistening Comprehension

Listening plays a key role both in daily communication and in foreign language learning. It is also the necessary skill for English as Foreign Language (EFL) students to master. Listening has been traditionally ranked first among the four language skills: listening, speaking, reading and writing because it is most frequently used and it provides input for EFL learners. Besides, the new CET exam pattern sees the increase of the listening proportion. Therefore, College English teachers should change their teaching focus to students'listening proficiency and listening comprehension course also has gained great importance in English class.In the learning and teaching of English, the writer found that most of students had some difficulties in their listening comprehension and college English teachers had not paid much attention to phonetic training and made full use of phonetic knowledge to help college students comprehend the listening material: meanwhile college students knew that phonetic knowledge was very important for their listening,but they did not know how to get phonetic knowledge and they had weak awareness to use phonetic knowledge in their listening process.This study, based on the theory of bottom-up processing, aims to find a new way to enhance college students'listening comprehension. With the phonological decoding being the first step in the bottom-up processing, phonetic training for the college English learners can not only help them to get basic phonetic knowledge, but also give them training about discrimination of phonemes, which will reduce the time they use to decode the phonemes and make them get familiar with the stress, liaison, weak form, rhythm and intonation, which may help them clearly and correctly understand the listening material; therefore their listening comprehension will be improved in the end.An experimental study was conducted to prove the two hypotheses: (1) There is a direct linear relationship between Chinese college English learners'phonetic ability and their listening competence; (2) systematic phonetics training improves listening comprehension. The study involved 63 sophomores in two classes from Yantai University, which were classified into an experimental class and a control class, consisting of 32 and 31 students respectively. At the initial stage of the experiment, pre-tests of listening comprehension and phonetics were given to all the students. In the following listening class, the experimental class was taught by means of combining the systematic explanation of the basic phonetic knowledge and phonetic training with regular listening practise from the textbook, while the teaching method of the control class was the traditional one-- regular listening practise from the textbook only without any phonetic training. After a semester's study, post-tests of listening comprehension and phonetics were given to all the students. Then data were collected and input into SPSS for analysis.The results of the data analysis show that there is a direct linear relationship between college English learners'phonetic ability and their listening competence. The findings indicate familiarity of phonetic knowledge and phonetic training of the participants really plays good effect on EFL listening comprehension.Based on the results of the study, teachers of ESL listening need to facilitate students listening by providing phonetic knowledge and phonetic training in the listening courses and make students aware of the importance of phonetic ability and help them to apply the phonetic knowledge in their listening process so that students'listening comprehension will be improved.