II. Types of Listening Obstacles

Listening comprehension can be affected by various factors. The factors can be identified as linguistic factors and non-linguistic factors (Zhang 289). The linguistic factors refer to the phonetic knowledge which includes vocabulary, grammar and so on; The non-linguistic factors that include background knowledge, lack of listening skills, the psychological factors, the

integrity of listening materials and so on. Only when teachers have a better understanding of difficulties that students encounter in their listening, can teachers help them to improve their listening ability.

2.1 Linguistic Obstacles

In this part, the paper will go to talk about linguistic obstacles. When it comes to linguistic obstacles, people may think it is something related to speaking. Linguistic obstacles involve in lots of factors. The paper will choose parts of them to analyze.

2.1.1 Lack of Phonetic Knowledge

Phonetics is crucial in listening comprehension. It is defined as the study of the medium of language. It is concerned with all the sounds that occur in the world’s language. The relationship between one’s phonetic knowledge and his listening is very close. In other words, “if there is no listening comprehension, phonetics will lose its existing value.” That is because sound is the direct medium of listening and speaking. On the one hand, the main purpose of students learning English is to communicate with others, so this requires them to express themselves as clearly as possible when they communicate with others. Only by using correct sounds, can students express their views and ideas accurately. On the other hand, students should understand others’ expression. Only when students use correct sounds, can they judge the real meanings of others. Therefore some basic knowledge about phonetics will greatly influence student’s listening comprehension. Unfortunately, many middle school students lack of enough phonetic knowledge of sound discrimination, liaison, plosive, intonation and so on. These linguistic obstacles affect listening comprehension deeply and hinder their improvement in listening comprehension. Middle school students should pay much attention to phonetic knowledge.

Sound Discrimination

Sound discrimination means to distinguish two or more sounds that are in the neighboring position in terms of places of articulation. The reason that most of middle school students can not understand listening materials is that they can not distinguish the vowel’s lengths. It is true that short vowel and long vowel are very hard to be identified for middle school students. For example, they can hardly distinguish the words like “sit-seat”, “pull-pool”. And some students can not distinguish some voiced and voiceless consonants. What is more, there are some

students affected by their dialect (Xu 252). For instance, some students can not discriminate the phonemes [n] and [l]. A pair of words like “light-night”, when some students hear the word “light”, they may recognize it as “night”. Besides, some students who can not distinguish flat tongue and cacuminal in their dialects could hardly distinguish consonants [s] and [θ], both of them are voiceless. However, [θ] is a dental consonant, [s] is an alveolar constant, the two consonants are heard alike. But they are produced by different speech organs and easily are pronounced wrong. Finally, the same sounds may correspond with different words, such as “meat-meet”, “where-wear”, “eight-ate”, “forth-fourth” and so on. These factors will affect listening comprehension to a certain degree.