An Investigation Of Non-English Major Mongolian College Students' English Listening Comprehension Obstacles

Listening is not only a kind of input skill for language learning,but also the base of developing other three skills of reading,writing and speaking.So far,there are many kinds of researches that focus on college students' English listening comprehension obstacles,however,limited researches on non-English major Mongolian students' listening comprehension obstacles.Therefore,it is necessary to study non-English major Mongolian students' listening comprehension obstacles,and give some useful and suitable suggestions.This research based on schema theory and Krashen's Input Hypothesis,adjusted and designed a new questionnaire according to questionnaires that used in the Master's degree thesis and the actual situation of Mongolian college students,there are 33 items in this questionnaire,which include linguistic obstacles and non-linguistic obstacles.Furthermore,the Cronbach's Alpha is 0.922 according to the calculation of SPSS20.0.The other additional research methods were the think-aloud experiment and interview,which were used to find out the listening comprehension obstacles of non-English major Mongolian students and the reasons that caused them.The subjects involved in the investigation were 320 Grade 1 and Grade 2 non-English majorsMongolian students from Inner Mongolian Normal University.After they finished the questionnaire,2 of them were chosen to do think-aloud experiment,10 of them and 3 teachers who taught them were chosen to do the interview.Aiming at settling down two questions: 1.what the listening comprehension obstacles do non-English major Mongolian college students have? 2.Why do the non-English major Mongolian college students have those obstacles?SPSS20.0 was used to analyze the collected data.Firstly,according to the descriptive statistic to analyze the data of questionnaire and find out the means and standard deviation,in order to answer the first research questions:what the listening comprehension obstacles do non-English major Mongolian college students have? Furthermore,through the independent sample T test,the differences between different majors,grades,native places and genders of non-English major Mongolian students can be found out.Finally,discussed the results of think-aloud experiment and interview.The research findings were as follows:Firstly,non-English major Mongolian students have two kinds of listening comprehension obstacles just as the former researchers studied:linguistic obstacles and non-linguistic obstacles,which include six obstacles:phonetic obstacles,intonation obstacles and vocabulary obstacles,the obstacles of listening habits and listening skills,the obstacles of emotional state and motivation and the obstacles of cultural background knowledge.Secondly,the reasons that caused non-English major Mongolian students' listening obstacles also include two aspects: subjective reasons and objective reasons,which contain six kinds of reasons: lack of linguistic knowledge,the influence of their mother tongue,bad listening habits and unfamiliar listening skills,low listening mood and unsuitable listening motivation,regional factors,difficult course book and listening materials,and teacher's factors.This thesis includes six chapters.Chapter one is the introduction.Chapter two is the literature review which includes the definitions and previous studies of the English listening comprehension obstacles as well as the relevant theories.Chapter three is the introduction of the research methodology,which consists of the research questions,the subjects,the instruments and the steps to collect and analyze the data.Chapter four is the result and discussion.Chapter five is to give some suggestions and strategies.And the last chapter is the conclusion of the thesis,including major findings and limitations of the study.According to the results,the author put forward some useful suggestions and strategies respectively:Firstly,non-English major Mongolian students should be taught effective listening skills and cultivate good listening habits.Secondly,non-English major Mongolian students should adjust a good emotional state and appropriate listening motivation.Thirdly,non-English major Mongolianstudents should make a good foundation of English basic knowledge,such as vocabulary,grammar,pronunciation.Fourthly,teachers should enhance their own teaching abilities,both professional knowledge and professional skills.