英语论文网

[∫s frɔm dʒə`pæn] (Elison). What’s more, word stress, sentence stress, intonation and rhythm will make understanding confusion as well. For instance, (1) Reader Digest is a world-known magazine. (2) It takes four hours for a meal to digest. It is an obvious fact that if you do not know the former “digest” which has the stress on the first syllables means “a summary”, while the latter with second syllable stressed is a verb meaning “(of food) be changed in the stomach and bowels”, you are unable to totally understand the meaning of the two sentence. Secondly, as we referred to at the head, English is the language used most commonly in the world, which has determined that there exists hundreds and thousands of various accents, dialects, idiolets, etc. And as we know, the branch of British English------ American English has been accepted by more and more people, and unavoidably their differences become a listening obstacle, too. For example, Americans prefer to nasalizing words like “can’t”, they always pronounce it as [kæn], not [ka: t] and nasalize as possible as they can. 2.1.2 Vocabulary obstacle It is evident that even if a learner has a solid foundation of English pronunciation that he or she is able to tell every sound, but he or she still cannot understand what a speaker says if he or she does not know what every word means. Vocabulary is central to people’s communication. Limited vocabulary must affect successful interpersonal communication. About 55% of subjects regard poor vocabulary as the largest hindrance during the process of listening comprehension. Some teachers attribute it all to the narrow- range vocabulary of students’, while ignoring that even though some students grasp a large amount of words, he or she cannot do as well as in listening activities. No one could be erudite like William Shakespeare who can use 20000 English words as easily as ABC. The vocabulary used most commonly by the native speakers is no more than 200. What count is that it is hard for ESL learner to resemble the native speakers on the control of English vocabulary. First, they don’t have an ideal English language-learning environment. Second, most of them learn the meanings of words by heart, isolating them with speech flows, not or seldom using it in real life. Here is an example, which once beat the author for limited vocabulary. A short conversation happened between a wife and her husband. (W: wife, H: husband). Situation: The husband just removed a heavy chest of drawers. W: There! Wait a minute. Let me stand back and have a look. H: Yes, it is not bad…stick out a bit. [8] It may be easy for you to recall the meaning of “stick” immediately, but you may not respond as quickly as what the phrase “stick out” means. Vocabulary barrier may get even worse as teachers and /or listening materials usually unconsciously encourage the learner to believe that everything that is said bears important information, which often result in ineffective comprehension, as well as feeling of fatigue and failure. [9] 2.1.3 Grammar obstacle Although the grammar factor does not influence the listening comprehension as the others, but a good master of grammar rules must help a learner get a deeper understanding of a speech, especially when he or she meets with complicated or long sentences, such as the subjunctive mood, inversion, and so on. Let’s take an example: I should have come yesterday. If a learner well knows the func