2。 Literature Review

     In human’s communication, Rivers finds that listening plays an important role in that the amount of time for listening in daily life is twice larger than that for speaking, four times than reading, five times than writing。 And also, long proposes many second language acquisition theories, all of which emphasize the significance of listening。 Michael Rost points out that comprehension is often considered to be the first goal of listening。 Listening comprehension is widely used to refer to all aspects of listening and it is a complicated process when perceiving speech, recognizing words, employing phonotactic rules and structuring sentence meaning by grammatical rules are dealt with step by step。 (Rost, 2005)。 To sum up, listening is important but difficult to English learners。 And it’s urgent to upgrade English learners’ listening ability。

2。1 The study of the correlation between phonetics and listening comprehension

     Phonetics is concerned with describing speech。 Speech production is the result of movements of the tongue and lips。 These movements can be thought as gestures forming particular sounds。 We can convey information by gestures of our hands that people can see, but in making speech that people can hear humans have found a more efficient way to impart information。 The gestures of the tongue and lips are made audible so that they can be heard and recognition。 Phonetics is a complex course which has both the segmental feature and some suprasegmental features。 The segmental features include the pronunciation of the inpidual speech sound, the strong and weak forms of certain words, assimilation, liaison and plosives and so on。 While suprasegmental features refer to stress, intonation patterns and so on。 (Ladefoged, 2001) 论文网

     Apparently, Spoken languages are the output of sound information which is composed of phonetic features such as liaison, assimilation, intonation patterns and stress。 And actually these phonetic features are closely related to our listening activity and it is because of these features that listening becomes difficult for second language learners。 In a word, phonetic elements can highly influence the processing of speech and listening comprehension can be blocked if they are not well dealt with (Brown, 2001)。 The listening strategies put forward by Nunan (2001) put emphasis on phonetic knowledge。 He proposes that phonetic features could help learners to identify the speaker’s meaning such as attitude and the information in the context。

     It is also pointed out that listening comprehension happens in the process of encoding of the speaker and decoding of the listener。 The inconsistency between them can cause obstacle in comprehension。 A listener perceives the acoustic information first。 Thus, an accurate decoding of acoustic information is crucial to bridge the comprehension and only with a proficiency of phonetic and phonological rules can the listener successfully respond to the speaker。 (Huang Hebin, 2001)