A Case Study Of Difficulties With CET-4Listening Comprehension For English Majors At Junior Colleges From The Cognitive Perspective

This study was undertaken to investigate the difficulties with CET-4listening comprehension for English majors at junior college in the phases of perception, parsing and utilization from a cognitive perspective. The theoretical base in this study is the cognitive three-phase model of language listening comprehension and the methodological base is attribution theory. The significance of this study is to gain some insight into language listening comprehension difficulties so as to help students with these difficulties improve their listening comprehension and their teachers take targeted strategies in their teaching.The subjects in this study were four third-year English majors from a junior vocational college, two girls and two boys. They had taken CET-4for three times, but all of them had failed, with their listening comprehension part below the passing score. They were selected by purposive sampling. The instrument of the study was the researcher herself according to Chen’s qualitative research (2000). She conducted a pilot study on the difficulties in CET-4listening comprehension with three other students in order to anticipate what problems might come up and to get familiar with the whole process of an interview. In the formal interviews, the four subjects were interviewed separately, once for each subject, which lasted one and a half hours or so. Data were elicited from the subjects’immediate retrospective verbalization. For each interview, the subject first listened to the same simulated CET-4listening test for about30minutes and then checked his/her answers. If s/he gave a correct answer, the interviewer would ask him/her to repeat what s/he had just heard to make sure that s/he really understood it. If s/he gave an incorrect answer, the interviewer would ask him/her to tell her what his/her listening comprehension difficulties were. The whole interview was recorded, transcribed and translated. Data analysis involved coding, categorization and summarization.The major findings yielded from the study are summarized as follows:First, in the phase of perception two types of listening comprehension difficulties were identified. One type was the difficulties in recognizing sounds of familiar words or expressions, to be more specific, the inability to perceive familiar words or expression with multi-syllables, words pronounced in a weak form or with unstressed syllables, numerals and words pronounced in a peculiar accent. This finding is consistent with Goh’s (2000). It might be attributed to the phenomenon of co-articulation, the failure to draw support from the context to make phonemic restoration or personal way to articulate the same phoneme. The other type was the difficulties in catching the beginning sounds of the next sentence, which might be caused by inability to process the received phonological information fast enough.Second, in the phase of parsing two types of listening comprehension difficulties were found:difficulties in recognizing the syntactic structure and difficulties in developing meaning out of the syntactic structure. The first type was subdivided into the difficulties in recognizing the phrasal structure of a sentence and the difficulties in forming a sentence structure, which might be caused by listeners’ failure to take advantage of the elapsing pause both between words within one phrase structure and between two-phrase structures in speaking to recognize a phrasal structure or their failure to make automatic information processing. The second type included the difficulties in recognizing the meaning of known words and expressions and difficulties in remembering what has been said, which were consistent with Goh’s findings (2000). These difficulties might be due to lexical ambiguity or the lack of mental lexicon, the limited capacity of the listeners’ short-term memory or the ineffective mental representation formed during parsing processing.Third, two types of difficulties in the phase of utilization were found:difficulty in making backward inferences to understand the intended meaning and difficulty in making forward inferences to predict the intended meaning. The former might be due to the failure to rely on prior contextual cues, stress or intonation and the latter might be caused by listeners’ incomplete schemata and limited world knowledge.This study has two limitations. One limitation is the failure to provide corresponding cognitive explanation for some difficulties in the phase of perception such as perceiving numerals; another is that there might exist something overlapping among the classification of different difficulties due to the recursive feature of the three-phrase model, that is to say, the boundary that separates one difficulty from another may be obscure.