英语论文网

CHAPTER ONE INTRODUCTION

The core of learning a second language is to be able to use the language tocommunicate with others. In this process, spoken word recognition lies in the centralposition for its extremely important role in transmitting the meaning. For nativespeakers, the perception of spoken words seems to be pretty easy because they seemto understand the speech automatically with little effort. While for a Chinese Englishas a Foreign Language (EFL) learner, listening comprehension may be the mostdifficult task throughout his/her English learning. This difficulty mainly derives fromthe trouble they have with auditory word recognition. To recognize an auditory wordis to relate the sound to meaning. The investigation of the recognition process ofauditory words is to explore how the sensory input is mapped onto the representationsof semantic meaning in the mental lexicon.

1.1 Background of the Research
This research is inspired by several phenomena observed in Chinese EFLlearners’ auditory word recognition. One is that quite a few learners claim to have theexperience of being able to recognize some words by sight, but cannot recognize themby sound. Another is that some learners often need to write down the auditory wordsfirst before they can recognize them. In a prior research by the author(Zhang Suying& Han Yuqiang, 2016), an instruction was given to the subjects of writing down theChinese meaning of the word they had heard and the requirement of “do not writedown the word’s spelling, only Chinese meaning” was explicitly made. However,among the 38 subjects, 28 of them had written down some words’spelling to facilitatetheir recognition of the auditory words. These phenomena mentioned above not onlyreflect that Chinese EFL learners’ ability of auditory word recognition is relativelyweak compared with that of visual word recognition, but also provoke the author’swondering of what role dose orthography play in auditory word recognition. What’smore, compared with English majors, recognizing auditory words can be a morestrenuous task for non-English majors. The sharp difference between the Englishmajors’ and non-English majors’ performances in listening comprehension can beeasily perceived in Chinese college English teaching. So here arouses anotherquestion: how do the learners’ proficiency levels of English affect their cognitiveprocess of auditory word recognition?
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1.2 Significance of the Research
Listening, as an essential part of language acquisition, has been a great challengefor Chinese English learners. One of the major reasons for this challenge may be thedifficulties learners have for auditory word recognition, which happens to be theprerequisite and foundation for listening comprehension. Only when the auditorywords are recognized can the comprehension of sentences and texts happen. Thus, thestudy of the cognitive process of Chinese English learners’ auditory word recognitiondesperately needs the attention from scholars both domestic and abroad.Despite the many theories and models proposed concerning word recognition,most of them are proposed in the native speakers’ situation. Few are testified forsecond language learners, let alone Chinese EFL learners. Nevertheless, they do havesignificant insights on the investigation of the recognition process of auditory wordsfor Chinese English learners and there are indeed some domestic scholars applyingth