The Impact Of Vocabulary Teaching On Listening Comprehension-from The Aspect Of Higher Vocational Colleges

In English language learning, the role listening plays cannot be ignored.Listening is an important way of language input, and it is the premise of successfulcommunication. However, in the practical teaching, the author found that most of thestudents have a poorer listening proficiency compared with their reading, speaking, orwriting ability. When doing listening practice, many students can only seize severalsingle words, from which seldom could students guess what is going on, let aloneunderstand the speaker’s implication or intentions. Chinese students lie in the Chineseenvironment, lacking an English environment, which adds difficulty to students’listening practice. However, it’s true that no matter for the quality education or theexam-oriented education listening is in an increasing demand. Such situation raises aproblem for English teachers: How to effectively improve the students listeningability?Wondering about the solution to this problem, the author designed this study. In thisstudy, two research questions are raised in advance: (1) Does vocabulary knowledgecontribute to the success of listening comprehension and to what extent? (2) Canlexical-chunk-oriented vocabulary teaching benefit students in their listeningcomprehension?Based on related researches carried out by Michael Lewis about the relationshipbetween lexical phrases and listening comprehension, the author fulfilled theexperiment to explore whether lexical-chunk-oriented vocabulary teaching canimprove the students’ listening ability. Though lexical chunks are labeled in differentways by different researchers, in this thesis, all the linguistic units, larger than a singleword, having integral forms, idiomatically determined meaning and pragmaticfunction, and occurring commonly together are regarded as lexical chunks. Manyresearchers have researched on lexical chunks. Those of Michael Lewis (1993, 1997)and Nattinger and Decarrico (1992) have made special contribution to arousingpeople’s attention to lexical chunks and laid theoretical foundation for later researchesIn this paper, the author introduces the psychological process and characteristic of listening comprehension, and then points out in specific listening activities, thelistener should be fully aware of the existence of lexical chunks and actively applythem in order to promote listening comprehension. Lexical chunks can improve thelistener’s short-term memory capacity, reduce information processing burden, andhelp the listeners to predict effectively, therefore, if the listener can accumulate acertain amount of lexical chunks and can make full use of them when doing listeningpractice, then the listener will greatly improve his/her listening proficiency.The participants of the study come from Shandong Economic ManagementCollege, majoring in accounting and belonging to two classes. Scores of listening testsin the pre-test indicate that the listening ability of the two classes doesn’t have muchdifference, so the two classes are randomly labeled as the experimental class and thecontrol class. The experimental period is 16 weeks. During this period, theexperimental class are taught by the new teaching method, both in the vocabularyteaching and listening practice, while the control class continue to be taught by thetraditional teaching method. The listening tests implemented at the end of theexperiment shows the scores for the two classes appear significant difference: Theaverage score of the experimental class is significantly better than that of the controlclass. Thus, the results reveal that the students’ vocabulary knowledge has a positivecorrelation with their listening comprehension, which is consistent with the author’sdaily observation, and that lexical-chunk-oriented vocabulary teaching can improvelistening comprehension ability.However, there are many other factors influencing listening comprehension, suchas: students’intelligence, their desire to improve, their enthusiasm, the psychologicalstate when doing listening practice, the difficulty of the listening materials and so on.The author couldn’t separate one influential factor from another. Therefore, this studyhas many deficiencies, inviting other researchers to further validate the theory.