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n read, speak, and write at one’s own pace, level of vocabulary and syntax, using dictionary if necessary. But when listening, the listeners have to listen at someone else’s pace, level of vocabulary and syntax. And no doubt that in real-life listening situations, a listener can listen to something once only unless he or she makes a request to a speaker. “If the listener does not understand the words while they are ‘still in the air’, it is usually too late.” [4] As the society demands good-for-all English talents, listening should be regarded as the most important in English teaching. Both teachers and students know the importance of listening ability in English learning, yet the model of teaching and learning still remain the traditional model: teachers explain or translate new words, then play the tape and ask the students to do the given exercises, finally replay the tape sentence by sentence to check the answer; students are required passively to write down the meaning of new words which most of them are seldom reviewed after class, and listen to the listening materials over again and again, without knowing much about listening skills and strategies. It is hard for them to get real improvement in listening comprehension. That’s why the author of this thesis tries to prove some effective ways to help ESL learners to master English listening skills, on the basis of the study of some linguists, language researchers and the results of a questionnaire aiming at finding out the obstacles of learners on different stages in listening comprehension. Firstly, the author introduces the barriers presented during listening comprehension. Secondly, the results of a questionnaire to survey different barriers that hinder the students’ listening understanding in junior school, senior school and college will be presented. Then the author focuses on how to develop corresponding effective listening strategies to eliminate the obstacles. It arrives at a conclusion of this paper at last. 2. A brief introduction of obstacles in listening comprehension 2.1 Linguistic obstacles 2.1.1 Phonetic obstacle Among 150 subjects, 74% express they cannot understand fast, natural native speeches completely. It suggests that failure to recognize the sound commonly exists in the students’ listening comprehension. Language is first perceived through its sounds. [5] We can find that during listening, “once we receive the pronunciation of a word, usually, things of pictures that the word stands for will come into our mind ”[6]. The two major activities we do in listening comprehension are: first, distinguishing sounds; second, making sense. So if a learner gets trouble in identifying the sounds, he or she will do in understanding as well. During the developing process as long as thousands of years, English language has formed its own phonetic system that particular rules or habits are involved, such as assimilation, liaison, incomplete explosion, weak forms and elision, etc. For example, the [ⅰ:] sound is nasalized in words like bean, green, team and stream, as it is followed by a nasal [n] or [m] (Assimilation); the [k], [p],[tr] in the words like school [sku:l], spring [spring], strict [strict] cannot be completely exploded and should be pronounced as [g], [b], [dr] (Incomplete explosion); I can smell gas [ai kə n smel gæs] (Weak forms); come in [`k Λm ing ],work out [wə :kaut], think of it [θiɳk ɔf it] [7] (Liaision.); She is from Japan