A Study Of Factors Influencing English Listening Of Higher Vocational College Students

Listening is an important skill in the language learning. It is not only an important channel for getting comprehensive language inputs, but also the most important method of communication.With the increase of international communication, English listening plays an increasingly important role in daily life, and the talents with high-quality English listening and speaking abilities are being widely appreciated by society. To meet this situation, HVC have to put more emphasis on English listening teaching.However, the current situation of public English teaching in HVC is not optimistic. Traditional teaching model of English listening holds misunderstanding of listening comprehension, the teaching methods are always very outdated and teachers usually do not have enough scientific and reasonable teaching strategies. These kinds of situation seriously affect the learning motivation of students. So it is necessary to find out the real factors affecting English listening of HVC students and reform the inefficient teaching methods.On the basis of the previous researches, the author concludes that the factors influencing HVC students’ English listening competence include students’ self-factors and teaching factors. And students’ learning motivation, anxiety, linguistic factors, cultural background knowledge, learning strategies are included in students self-factors; teaching environmental factors, teacher’ self-factors and teaching material factor are included in teaching factors.According to these factors, and combined with the practical situation in teaching, in this thesis the author attempts to solve the following three questions:(1) What is HVC students’ weakest link in English learning?(2) Among the factors influencing HVC students’ English listening comprehension, which ones are the biggest barriers the students have encountered during the listening process? (3) What should HVC teachers do to improve their self-competence and teaching methods, so as to help students minimize the impact of negative factors, rebuild their active leaning motivation and suitable learning strategies?The author adopted the methods of test on students’ English listening proficiency, interview and questionnaire, investigated150second year students of2011in Shandong Medical College. And based on the data collected, the following findings are got:(1) English listening is the weakest link in HVC Students’ English learning.(2) Students’ self-factors are more important than other factors in influencing English listening of HVC students. Among self-factors, students’ learning motivation and basic linguistic knowledge are the major factors affecting HVC students’ English listening level.(3) In this study, HVC teachers should change their teaching methods, manage to stimulate students learning motivation and help students change their learning strategies, so as to improve their English listening level.The findings of this study, we hope, will not only enrich theories and practice of English listening in HVC, but also help students master the skills of English listening, and eventually improve students’ listening ability.