1 Introduction Listening and speaking are two important parts of English study. They link to each other inseparably, however, listening is more challenging than speaking. When we speak, we can choose appropriate words, sentence structures and speed of speaking. But we can not request the speaker to adjust himself to our speed. Listening is the basic part of communication and the first step of the language study, so listening play a main role in language skills. With the spread of communicative teaching method and reform of College English Test, people pay more attention to listening comprehension and request school to strengthen the teaching of English listening. However, it is difficult to improve listening skill soon because there are many factors affecting listening comprehension. 2

1. The Importance of Listening Listening, as a part of communication in human society, plays a more crucial role in today’s world which is experiencing information revolution and globalization. It is as well a significant element of improving English skill, takes an important position in English study. As a beginner, you must improve your listening level as soon as possible to master a language indeed. Listening correctly can lead to the fluency of reading and speaking. For any language, voice is in the first place, spoken language could represent the communication functionality of language. During the course of communicate, by way of tongue, rhythm and stress etc, both sides can exchange ideas better. One of the important destinations of studying language is that you can communicate with the person living with, and both levels of listening and method of how to listen are directly concerned with the degree of mastership. According to one American investigation, when human being is in his waking status, he spends 70% time to varied social activities, among them writing takes 11%, reading takes 15%, speaking takes 32%, but listening takes 42% at least. 1 Thus, improving English listening is one of the key stones of mastering this language. Nevertheless, in daily study, because we are neither able to control the speed, clearness of the listening material nor can we understand the characteristics of the speaker; it’s considerably hard to comprehend the meaning of the material in a limited amount of time. Generally speaking, there are many obstacles in English listening, such as new words, complex sentence structures, acquaintance with the content, the speed of the speaker, the disturbing voice in the background and the change of tone etc. It’s not only due to the language itself, but is also because of the culture understandings, logical thinking, and listening skill, etc and many other factors. Understanding these factors can help students overcome these obstacles, which, in turn, is an essential part for English learners to improve English listening. 2. Factors Affecting Listen Comprehension

2.1 Influence of Pronunciation As a language, English must be pronounced. The most radical material appearance is sound and tone. If the student does not have enough knowledge of sound, the ability of distinguishing sound will be worse, then directly influence the ability of understanding. Pronunciation is the most basic element. The correctness of learners’ pronunciation directly affects the effectiveness of 3

efficiency of learner’s listening. Speaking of this aspect, people from urban and developed areas are better than those from rural or undeveloped areas. This is because developed cities have advantages on Mandarin speaking and language studying environments and people usually pay more attention to it. Besides this, we ought to realize the influence of distractive accent to pronunciation. This factor reduces the quality of pronunciation, misleads learners’ study. One distinct characteristic of spoken English is informality. For example, we always say “we’ll, there’s” rather than “we shall” or “there is”. When people meet each other, they always say “Hi!” or “Morning!”, “How do you do” is only used in formal situation. Otherwise, we hope others will speak English word one by one when we study it. But the characteristic of spoken English is that we couldn’t speak separately between the meanings of a sentence. Meanwhile, such as concatenation, inexplosive, unstress etc could make difficulty for listening. When you understand these, you just prepare for listening. The incorrect pronunciation of some teacher directly influences the simulation of the student， which will cause the following problems： ○1、Couldn’t distinguish similar factors between words, such as /f/&/v/,/s/&/z/,/e/&// etc; ○2、Not acquaint with stress and unstress, such as “and” should be pronounced as /nd/, but it always unstressed as /nd/,/n/or/n/ , in and out /in nd aut/,black and white /bl n wait/,bread and butter /bred n bt/ etc;