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Chapter One Introduction

This chapter consists of three sections. The first section is the background of thestudy. With the implementation of reform and opening policy, the communicationbetween our country and the international country is very close. Language is a veryimportant factor of successful communication. In addition, English as the lingua franca,becomes increasingly important. Listening, speaking, reading and writing are fouressential traditional language skills, among which listening is a very important one. Sothis study researches the factors that affect listening. The second section is thesignificance of the study. Vocabulary knowledge is the prerequisite of languagecommunication. So this study does a research into the correlation and extent aboutvocabulary knowledge and listening comprehension. The third section is theorganization of the dissertation.

1.1 Background of the Study
Listening, speaking, reading and writing are four essential traditional languageskills. If EFL (English as a Foreign Language) learners want to use the foreignlanguage similarly as their mother tongue, they should pay close attention to theirlistening abilities in their foreign language learning process. Listening ability meansgetting meaning or information from speakers and this ability is the most difficult butessential among the above four skills, because listening is a complicated and aninvisible mental process which refers to catching what the speaker says (Rost, 2002).What’s more, in college English, listening teaching has been in a decisive position.Krashen (1985) pointed out that listening is an important way to promote the languageinput. Rivers (1981) claimed that when adults communicated with each other, the ratioof listening took up 40%-50%, and speaking occupied 25%-30%, and reading was11%-16%, and writing was 9%. So people want to have an effective and successfulcommunication, they have to promote their listening competence.In the domain of language testing, the listening ability is also called listeningcomprehension which is interrelated to psychological activities. According toVandergrift (2007), listening comprehension is a very important language skill todevelop. However, the learners can control their listening comprehension. It is mainlyinfluenced by internal subjective elements and external objective elements.
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1.2 Significance of the Study
In the early 20th century, listening test was first presented. Until in the 1940s,listening became a section of examination. Many researchers at home and abroad mademany researches and obtained the plenteous results. At the same time, they alsoachieved fruitful results in vocabulary knowledge. But most researches just focused onlistening strategies or the background of listening. As is proposed above, it is a factthat vocabulary knowledge is one of the most important elements that has an effect onlistening comprehension. Vocabulary knowledge is the fundamental of learningforeign language, and it is one of the most important symbol to measure learners’foreign language level. For many Chinese students, listening is a very difficult part intheir foreign language test. That’s because they are influenced in their native language,and they have little chance to practice their foreign language, in particular, listeningcomprehension. There are few researches concerning the correlation and extent amongbreadth of vocabulary knowledge, d