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word or each sentence. They will think hard when they meet some difficult words or sentences, while a great many students could understand the material directly. They often translate the English into Chinese in their mind, thinking that only in this way can the sentence be understood. This is also a reason, trying to understand each word is difficult, and it is not necessary at all. So there are so many factors affecting listening comprehension. How to improve our Chinese students’ English listening comprehension? The paper will discuss about that. 2. Factors affecting students’ English listening comprehension “Listening comprehension can be affected by various factors which can be identified as internal and external. Internal factors refer to the listener’s characteristics, language proficiency level, memory, age, gender, background knowledge as well as aptitude, motivation, and psychological and physical factors. External factors are mainly related to the type of language input and tasks and the context in which listening occurs.” [1] 2.1 Internal factors 2.1.1 Linguistic proficiency “Language proficiency, listener’s linguistic knowledge, is a major variable in the studies of listening comprehension.”[2] Listener’s linguistic knowledge, such as phonetics, grammar, lexicology, affect their listening ability internally. (і) Problems on phonetics and phonology “Everybody knows that phonetics studies human speech sounds and the way they are articulated, and phonology deals with the sound system of a particular language.” [3] “According to an American scholar, Rita Wong, phonetics is crucial in listening comprehension. This is because sound is the direct medium of listening and speaking. Only by using correct sound, can we express our views and ideas accurately. Similarly, it is inevitably that poor pronunciation will cause aural difficulties in smooth acceptance of others’ ideas expressed in correct pronunciation.” [4] Unfortunately, we found that many Chinese students lack basic knowledge of sound discrimination and phonetic changes, which severely hinders their improvement in listening ability. (a) Phonetic discrimination For most Chinese students the discrimination of some sounds is a problem in listening comprehension, especially, some vowels, such as /i:/ and /i/. For example, they can hardly distinguish the words like “live-leave”. (b) Phonetic Varieties Phonetic varieties include liaison, incomplete plosive, word stress, sentence stress, intonation and so on. Liaison is one phenomenon of sound changes in phonetics, which occurs between two words in a phrase or a sentence. Liaison usually occurs when the first word ends with a consonant, such as letter n, l, r, t, or, d, and the second word begins with a vowel. “In liaison and assimilation there are two kinds of sound changes. One is that one sound is pronounced more like its adjacent sound. The other is that a phoneme is inserted between two dissimilar sounds.” [5] Take “Could you help me?” for example. In general “could” is pronounced as / kud/. In this sentence, listeners will hear it as /kud ju/ when “could” and “you” are in assimilation. Loss of plosive is also one important factor influencing listening comprehension. Usually a complete plosive occurs when two stop sounds are adjacent in a word or in a phrase, and incomplete plosive occurs when a stop sound precedes one of the fricative sounds or when a stop sound precedes one of nasal sounds or