An Investigation On The Obstacles Of English Listening Comprehension In Senior Middle School

Recently, with steady growth of the economy, the international status and the national quality in China has been enhanced and improved continuously. Therefore, people put forward high new and higher requirements for English education. The calls for practical and in-depth reform in English teaching in high school are growing louder. Many provinces and cities support programs that are about carrying out New Curricular Reform. There are voices about changing the contents and scores of English in the national matriculation entrance examination(NMET).As the curriculum reform implements, English listening comprehension in China has been attached more and more attention, in which listening obstacles are most frequently discussed.Various researches show concerns on the obstacles from inside to outside. However, through a careful review of literature, the author finds that most researches have neglected the listening obstacles of high school students in new situation. What’s more, it is obvious that most of the previous studies have been done in western counties while in China, with largest number of English learners in the world, the listening studies relevant to this are deficient. While at the same time, listening obstacle is still a common phenomenon in present Chinese high schools and complaints about listening difficulties appear here and there.On account of these factors that the author made a study of the senior high school students’ language obstacles on listening, which lies in three parts: whether listening obstacles is a common phenomenon among high school students; the relationships among listening barriers,listening comprehension and the English marks. The linguistic and non-linguistic factors that cause the barriers.Linguistic factors investigation is mainly on phonetics, tempo, intonation, vocabulary, and grammar barriers. Linguistic knowledge is the base of listening comprehension. Main barriers lie in wrong phonetics or intonations, lack of vocabulary and complicated grammar structures.Non-lingual factors include teaching methods, textbooks, cultural backgrounds and the students qualities barriers. The traditional listening teaching approaches affect many teachers in high schools. They emphasis the micro skills in listening, so their students accept information passively. It is hard for them to make good use of their prior knowledge, and bring their subjective initiative into play. Teachers in high school still use traditional and single materials, neglect cultivating the practicality of listening. Through the investigation, there exists English listening obstacles among high school students. The negative effect appears in English listening obstacles and English listening proficiency.This investigation uses interview and questionnaires. The number of subjects are 200, including 108 male students and 92 female ones. All the data is entered into the computer and analyzed by SPSS19.0.