A Study On The Influence Of English Phonological Awareness Training On Senior-high School Students’ Listening Comprehension Scores

During the past forty years,study on phonological awareness has always been a hot topic in the field of meta-linguistics and psycholinguistics.Previous researches have been mostly focusing on the relationship between phonological awareness and reading comprehension.Many researchers have made remarkable achievements in this area.However,few researchers have studied the influence of phonological awareness on listening comprehension.Compared with studies overseas,domestic study on phonological awareness is far from sufficient,and even fewer researches deal with the influence of phonological awareness on listening comprehension.Therefore,this thesis attempts to explore the influence of phonological awareness training on listening comprehension of senior-high school studentsThis study puts forward three major research questions centering on the relationship between phonological awareness and listening performance of senior-high school students.(1)What’s the relationship between the phonological awareness and listening comprehension of senior-high school students?(2)Can phonological awareness training improve the phonological awareness level and listening performance of senior-high school students?(3)Does phonological awareness training have different effects on the listening performance of students with different English levels?If so,what is the difference?In order to answer these three questions,the study first pre-tested the phonological awareness and listening comprehension of 84 senior-high school students from two parallel classes with normal learning ability,and then conducted an analysis on the relationship between their phonological awareness level and listening performance.The phonological awareness test was designed from the following four dimensions:syllable awareness,onset-rime awareness,phoneme awareness,and pseudo-word spelling,and the listening comprehension pre-test paper adopted the listening test in 2016 Jiangsu College Entrance Examination.No significant difference was found between two classes in pre-tests.One of the classes was set as the experimental class for a 10-week phonological awareness training,which was divided into two stages.The first stage mainly dealt with basic phonological knowledge,such as the American Phonetic Alphabet and sound-letter correspondence rules.In the second stage,the author conducted the phonological awareness training,including syllable awareness training,onset-rime awareness training,and phoneme awareness training.The students in the experimental class were divided into two groups according to their comprehensive English scores of the previous semester,with usual performance occupying 30%,mid-term exam scores occupying 30%and final exam scores occupying 40%.21 students with higher scores were categorized as Group A with high proficiency and the other 20 people with lower scores as Group B with low proficiency.After the 10-week phonological awareness training,both the phonological awareness level and listening performance of the 84 students were post-tested.Considering that the pre-test and post-test possessed a long time span,and that the standard answer as well as the scores of each student were not published after the pre-test,the post-test adopted the same phonological awareness test to ensure the same difficulty coefficient,and the listening comprehension post-test paper adopted the listening test in 2017 Jiangsu College Entrance Examination to ensure the consistency in test types,score distribution and difficulty coefficient with the pre-test.The experimental results indicate that the phonological awareness level of senior-high school students does have an effect on their listening performance.The positive correlation between the two is that the higher the students’ phonological awareness level is,the better their listening performance will be.For students with higher English proficiency,the positive impact of phonological awareness training on improving their listening performance is more prominent,that is,the higher their comprehensive English score is,the more their listening performance is improved after the phonological awareness training,which indicates that phonological awareness training is very beneficial to the improvement of the listening performance of senior-high school students,especially those with higher English proficiency.Therefore,this study provides us with some implications.As a front-line English educator,we should not only understand and grasp the theoretical knowledge and research trends related to phonological awareness and phonological awareness training,but also need to constantly explore and improve the methods and techniques for effective and practical phonological awareness training during our daily practice,hoping to effectively improve students’ English listening performance.