one: explain the new words-play the tape-do the exercise-check the answers. After finishing their exercises, students are asked to check their answers by listening to the whole passage again, or the teacher?s oral answers. Sometimes, the teacher plays the tape sentence by sentence or several times in order for students to finish their “finishing in the blanks” exercises, or make sure of the meaning of one word or one sentence. They only focus on the right answer to the question while neglecting the process of learning and the cultivation of students? listening skills. 3.1.3 Problems in Choosing Listening Materials
In most middle schools, suitable and authentic listening materials are in great shortage. Listening continues to be underrated in many programs, and some of the recommended methods and techniques, as well as some published materials continue to be based on outdated models of language learning and teaching. Course books give limited attention to listening, and very few specialized listening instructional materials are available. So the materials in listening classes are improper. On one hand, some materials chosen by the teacher are beyond students? ability, either too long or too difficult to understand. On the other hand, the materials are irrelevant to students? experiences or are unfamiliar to students, which cause students? frequent distraction and thus lower students? interest and motivation in listening. 3.1.4 Influence of Traditional English Education System
In today?s teaching circumstances, English teachers pay more attention to improving students? ability of taking exams rather than their listening. Because of this, teachers and students spend plenty of time talking about grammar and often students have a lot of knowledge of the language, but little ability of using it in real life. As a vicious circle of the test-oriented education, students learn English as knowledge rather than ability. So there is no chance for them to improve listening. 3.2 Problems of Students
It is clear that teachers can influence students? listening deeply. Besides, students? learning also has problems, which can be divided into two aspects: Linguistic and non-linguistic problems.
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3.2.1 Linguistic Problems 3.2.1.1 Speed Problem
The speed problem refers that students cannot understand as fast as the listening materials. According to the study of Griffths, the speed of two hundred words every minute is rather difficult for middle-level students. While sometimes, if the speed is too fast, the listener may have little or no time for thinking, if it is too slow, the listener may feel unreal or even feel boring. As we all know, listening is related to knowledge and its application to pronunciations, stresses, rhymes, vocabulary, syntax and pragmatics. For many Chinese English learners, when listening to English materials, they often translate what they hear into Chinese instead of thinking in English, which prolongs the process of information analysis and lowers the speed of listening comprehension. The main characteristic of listening is that language is perceived through listening instead of seeing, which it is really hard for English learners.
3.2.1.2 Pronunciation Problem
The standard pronunciation is the guarantee for improving listening comprehension; some students do not have an accurate pronunciation of words at first, so they find it hard to understand what they heard correctly. In English, they are many words that have similar pronunciation, but with different meanings. Such as cure［kju］and kill［kill］, bad［b?d］and bed［bed］and so on. For example, if a doctor wants say: “I?ll cure you”, but his pronunciation is very bad, and he says: “I?ll kill you”, the patient must be very frightened when he hears that. So we can see that the poor sound identifying ability is the main manifestation of the pronunciation problem of the students. The sound identifying ability mainly refers to the listener matches the sounds he receives with the meanings stored in his brain and thus integrated the sounds and the meanings, it is the basis of listening comprehension. It happens that the largest difficulty of middle school students is that they are unable to realize the assimilation of the sounds, to notice the omission, and to tell the unstressed syllables and words.
3.2.1.3 Vocabulary Problem
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Although to do more listening is an active means of improving one?s listening ability, listening ability is not completely determined by the times you do listening practice or the lengths and difficulty degrees of what you listen to. Listening, which is not an isolated language skill, is not only connected and affected by speaking, reading and writing but also is the integrated reflection of one?s knowledge of English. For many English learners, new words are big problems. When they first meet with a new word, they feel uncomfortable, the second new word makes them confused, and the third and fourth one always lead to one?s giving up. Besides, some useful expressions and idioms also form a barrier in listening. For example: what?s eating you? (What is the matter with you?). It is Greek to me (I don?t know it). If learners know nothing about these, they will fail to understand what they are listening. Therefore, students must establish a substantial vocabulary in order to understand listening materials of certain difficulty degree. According to the English Teaching Syllabus for Middle School students, two thousand English words and a certain amount of phrases are enough for understanding primary listening materials. The fact that many students are not up to this standard does affect their listening comprehension to some extent. What the listener hears in listening is nothing but sounds, but they cannot relate the sounds to the signals they stand for and they cannot, in return, get what the signals stand for-meaning. To sum up, theoretically, the size of one?s vocabulary determines one?s listening ability in an aspect. 3.2.1.4 Grammatical Problem
Grammar is the law of language organizing and the principles on changes of words and making up of sentences. Grammar helps us to understand the listening materials, make reasonable judgments about the action itself, the time it happens, the feeling of the speaker, etc. The students, if lack of enough grammar knowledge such as having no idea of sentence structures of usage of words and phrases, won?t be able to understand the grammatical and logical relations between phrases. Since their understanding cannot go side by side with the transferred information form of the listening materials, it won?t be possible for them to get a correct understanding of the sentences. Grammar can be considered to be a strong point for middle school students.
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However, listening comprehension is quite different from reading comprehension. In listening practice, a sentence or expression just flash across the ears. There is not so much time for the listener to make grammatical analysis on a sentence or a word in order to understand what comes next. So there is the necessity of knowing the grammar as well as he knows his palm. The students, whose insufficient grammar is only enough for understanding those sentences of simple structures, have difficulties in making sound analysis or judgment in a very short time of those complicated ones. The listening effect is directly influenced by one?s grammar knowledge. Therefore, “we would like to know what happens, because if we understand the system, we can use English more effectively.”(Underwood, 1981) What?s more, Underwood states that “understanding the grammatical framework of a language is extremely important for some student.”
3.2.2 Non - Linguistic Problems
3.2.2.1 Cultural and Background Knowledge Problem
Background knowledge consists of cultural and topic background knowledge, which are factors that affect listening comprehension. Language is one way by which culture is reflected. As every language is born and developed in a specific social and historical environment, it reflects various traditions and customs, historical backgrounds, cultural differences. Language expressions and cultural phenomena are unique in different social or historical periods. For example, there are some unique Festivals in the west, like Easter, Thanks Giving Day, Christmas and so on, while in China, we have the Spring Festival, Dragon boat Festival, Middle Autumn Festival, etc. English learners also should know some political systems like Parliament, Congress, Divide and Check, and some idioms such as: Speaking of the devil and the devil comes. Two heads are better than one… In practical communication and mutual understanding, conflicts or cultural shock will appear if students do not know about cultural background. In western countries, it is polite to call their relatives, friends or even parents their last names to show intimate relations. However, it is impolite to do so in China. So students who know nothing about the disparities between cultures will often meet listening obstacles if they try to understand the foreign language according
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to their own culture and language. Due to their scarce understanding of the history, culture difference, tradition, living habits and life-styles, students will have difficulty in listening to materials about western social histories and religious festivals. 3.2.2.2 Psychological Problem
Listening comprehension is a complicated psychological process. Under normal conditions, students make use of his knowledge stored in his brain and his experiences to distinguish sounds, induce, synthesize and other psychological activities so as to complete the whole process of listening comprehension. However, this series of psychological activities will be hardly possible when students are in depression, anxiety, disappointment, dejection, fear or other similar states.
There are mainly six kinds of barriers in listening comprehension:（1） Attention. Many students cannot pay attention on what they are listening and often in a state of being absent or fake listening when having listening classes, which greatly influence their listening. As time passing by, they may get used to the state of being mindless in listening and cannot overcome such bad habits.
（2）Memory. According to cognitive processing system, memory is a significant variable in listening comprehension. This study shall focus on two types of memory: short-term and long-term memory. Short-term memory refers to the place where the received information is stored for a short period. The capacity of short -term memory is limited to about seven units, plus or minus two. Short-term memory for target language is often overloaded. So it is easily for listeners to forget what they had heard. Long-term memory is more permanent and has an unlimited capacity. Information stored in long-term memory is stored in an interconnected network. Information retained in the short-term memory may sink into the long-term memory and become permanently stored. While information in the long-term memory may be activated and come into the short-term memory for current use (Ur, 1984).
（3）Interest. As we all know, interest is the best teacher, especially for young students. While in many middle schools, the English teacher still instructs the traditional teaching strategy in listening class: explain the words-play the tape-do exercise-check the answer. They only focus on the right answer to the question instead
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