英语专业四级与大学英语六级听力材料文本分析A Text Analysis of TEM-4 and CET-6 Listening Materials文献综述

文献综述

1.Introduction1.1 Research Background With the acceleration of world trade and economic globalization, English is becoming increasingly important in international communication. In order to meet the social demand for international and compound talents, the Ministry of Education requires in College English Course Requirement (2004) that the teaching goal of college English courses is to cultivate students comprehensive ability in English use, especially focusing on their listening and speaking ability, so that they can effectively communicate orally and write information in English in future work and social interactions. College English Test Band 4 (CET-4) and College English Test Band 6 (CET-6) are playing increasingly important role under such background, aiming at examining the English competence of the non-English majors in China, which are also closely connected with students graduation and future career. So CET-4 and CET-6 always catch the attention of college students and educators. Either CET-4 or CET-6, listening comprehension has always playing an decisive role, accounting for 35% in the total score. Since the CET-4 exam in June 2016, the National College English Level 4 Examination Committee made partial adjustments to the listening part of the test. The adjusted CET-4 cancels the traditional short dialogue listening and short text dictation in the listening part, and adds three short news articles, but the score is still as high as 35%. The purpose of this CET-4 reform is to test college students integrated English language competence more comprehensively and objectively, and to provide a more accurate evaluation basis for the implementation of the newly issued document of College English Course Requirement. However, by analyzing studentsCET scores, it can be seen that listening is the weakest as well as the most difficult part for them. In addition, vocabulary is an influencial and decisive factor for students to comprehend the listening materials.Due to the great importance of listening comprehension in English proficiency and its direct connection to vocabulary, this thesis will collect 2 listening materials from CET-4 and CET-6 respectively, and then focus on lexical complexity of them, so as to find out the similarities and differences between them two, and then provide some useful suggestions to English listening teaching.1.2 Research Purpose and Significance The research purpose of this study is to find out the characteristics of the listening materials of CET-4 and CET-6 in terms of lexical complexity, Based on these characteristics, the author will provide some corresponding and practical suggestions to college English listening teaching, which will strengthen the teaching of English listening and improve students English skills.2.Literature ReviewThis part will review previous studies in lexical complexity abroad and at home, as well as previous studies in listening comprehension abroad and at home. 2.1 Review of Lexical ComplexityLexical complexity is important in Second Language Acquisition. The measurement of lexical complexity in second language acquisition research includes at least three basic variables: lexical density, lexical diversity, and lexical sophistication (Read, 2000; Skehan, 2003 ; Bulteet al, 2008). Lexical density measures the number and proportion of content words and function words in the text, lexical diversity refers to the range of words involved in the text, and lexical sophistication refers to the proportion of low-frequency words or high-level words in the text.In the field of Second language acquisition, foreign scholars have already carried out research on lexical complexity. The research can be generally summarized into two types: the study of lexical complexity and writing, and the study on the development of lexical complexity. As for the relationship between writing and lexical complexity. This can be traced back to the 1980s or even earlier. For example, the Swedish scholar Moira Linnarud (1986) compares the English compositions of Swedish-speaking students with English-speaking students, and finds that the latter performs better than the former in lexical richness, correctness, diversity, fluency, etc. There are also scholars noticing the relationship between vocabulary complexity and writing quality. Scholars such as Engber A. Cheryl (1995) measures the composition of international students at Indiana University. He formulates the same composition topic and makes time-limited requirements. The result shows that the lexical richness and complexity play a huge constructive role in the formation of composition. In terms of the research on the development of lexical complexity. Lenko Szymaniska (2002) takes the freshmen and sophomores of English majors in Polish universities as his research objects, and finds that seniors are significantly better than freshmen in the correctness, richness and complexity. Laufer Batia and Nation Paul (1995) conducts comparative study of the English compositions of freshmen and sophomores. They find that word frequency can effectively reflect certain reliability and validity, and to some extent, it can distinguish the lexical complexity of English writing.The research on the lexical complexity in China started relatively late, and the research can be divided in two types. Firstly, the study on the relationship between lexical complexity and writing, such as Tan Xiaochen (2006), Qin Xiaoqing, Wen Qiufang (2007). Among them, Qin Xiaoqing and Wen Qiufang (2007) conduct a research on 240 English compositions of English majors in a key domestic university from grades one to four, and find that lexical diversity and lexical sophistication in lexical complexity are positively correlated with composition scores, which further verifies the findings of Engber (1995); the second is to explore the lexical complexity development of English majors and non-English majors, such as Bao Gui (2008), Wan Lifang (2010), Wang Haihua, Zhou Xiang (2012), Zhu Huimin, Wang Junju (2013), among which Zhu Huimin and Wang Junju (2013) study 30 English majors from freshman to senior year. After in-depth analysis of 120 argumentative papers on the same topic written in 4 years, it is found that in the process of improving English proficiency, the acquisition rules and development trajectories of different dimensions of students vocabulary richness are not the same.Through reviewing previous research on lexical complexity, it can be seen that researchers are more interested in the relationship between English writing and lexical complexity, but the relationship between English listening and lexical diversity is rarely explored.2.2 Review of Listening ComprehensionBefore the 1950s, people thought that listening comprehension was a process of passively receiving information. With the development of information theory, people have a new understanding of the nature of listening comprehension. Domestic scholars (Huang Jianling, 2004; Liu Lili, 2007) are influenced by the theories of western academic circles, and mainly study the process of listening comprehension from the perspectives of psychology, cognitive psychology and psycholinguistics. Such as the theory of cognitive schema, information processing theory and so on.From the perspective of cognitive psycholinguistics, Liu Ruixue (1993) and Du Jian (1992) believe that the process of speech comprehension is a process of information processing. From the perspective of schema theory, Wang Xingquan (1999) explaines the nature of listening comprehension and uses it to guide teaching. Huang Zidong (1998) uses schema theory to discuss the influence of topic familiarity on listening comprehension. From the perspective of psycholinguistics, memory is considered to be a key factor affecting hearing (Li Dongmei, 2002). Chen Jitang (1995) points out that the biggest obstacle for students to understand a long text is their wrongmethods for memory . Therefore, he proposes specific measures to help students comprehend long articles, such as overall grasp of the text, the key sentence memory method, the four-element memory method and so on. From the perspective of semiotics, Han Xiaofang and Wen Meixin (1998) explore the process of listening comprehension. In addition, Li Dongmei (2000) makes a detailed discussion on listening comprehension process by using Relevance Theory.Analyzing the influencing factors of listening comprehension is helpful to improve listening comprehension ability. The following part summarizes and analyzes the relevant research of domestic and foreign scholars. Many foreign scholars have conducted in-depth research on the influencing factors of listening comprehension. Grice (1969) believes that to understand the speakers implication is not the decoding of the language, but the pragmatic reasoning. While pragmatic reasoning is based on contextual assumptions and relies on the cooperative principlesin communication. Sperber and Wilson (1986) hold that people do not necessarily follow the principle of cooperation in communication, but only need to use the interpretation that is most relevant to the context of discourse. Anderson (1988) proposes that different regions and social classes lead to different accents, and the stronger the accent of the recorder, the greater the impact on the subjects performance. He also believes that the faster the speaker, the harder it is for the subjects to understand the listening material. Yew (2006) regards the length of the material as one of the factors affecting listening cognition .Domestic scholars have also conducted adequate research on the influencing factors of listening comprehension. Wang Wei (1991) analyzes the subjective and objective factors affecting listening comprehension in detail, and holds that these factors contain both positive and negative factors. Liu Longgen (2008) specifically analyzes ten main factors that affect foreign language listening comprehension from two dimensions of the listeners individual factors (such as memory, background knowledge, etc.) and text, which help English learners overcome listening comprehension barriers. Du Jian (1992) proposes that listening comprehension ability is a comprehensive ability, and the evaluation of students listening ability should be influenced as little as possible by memory factors, oral expression factors, and writing ability factors. Liu Ruixue (1993) points out that a persons conceptual ability, background knowledge and processing strategies constitute to the acquisition of listening comprehension ability. Zou Aimin (1996) believes that the cultivation of listening comprehension should start from cultivating students phonetic knowledge, language knowledge, and social and cultural knowledge, and should also pay attention to cultivating students predictive ability. Zhu Fangcheng (1999) believes that due to listening thinking is time-limited, so memory strength, reasoning ability, and inherent knowledge of the listener all have a strong restrictive effect on listening comprehension, and they determine the speed at which the listener processes information.To sum up, the research of foreign scholars shows that the accent, speed, text length, pragmatic reasoning ability and background knowledge of the recorder will have an impact on listening comprehension. The research of domestic scholars shows that the following factors are influencing listening comprehension: vocabulary size, syntax, grammar, discourse pattern, topic familiarity, background knowledge, cultural differences, listening materials, memory, reasoning ability, inherent knowledge of the listener, etc.As for vocabulary, it is obviously an important factor that influences the effects of listening comprehension, but which tends to a research gap in present research in listening comprehension.References:Anderson, J. R.(1985).Cognitive Psychology and Its Implications. New York: W. H.Freeman Press.Bulte,B.,A.Housen,M.PierrardDaele.(2008).Investigatinglexicalproficiencydevelopmentovertime:ThecaseofDutch-speakinglearnersofFrenchinBrussels[J].JournalofFrenchLanguageStudies18:277-298.EngberCA.(1995).TherelationshipoflexicalproficiencytothequalityofESLcompositions.JournalofSecondLanguageWriting.4(2)Grice, H.P. (1969). Utterers meaning and intentions. 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