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1、On the Effect of Short Term-Memory on College English Listening Comprehension1. IntroductionLanguage is the bridge of communication, and English is one of the most important medium languages to transfer all kinds of information from all over the world. As a vital skill, listening is the first step o
2、f learning English and communication. Therefore, listening plays a rather important role in English learning for Chinese learners who take English as the foreign language. Listening is one of the most important language skills. The contemporary society exhibits a shift away from printed medium towar
3、ds audio-visual one and people need to develop a high level of proficiency in listening .Besides, various tests carried out by educational institutions, such as Band Four and Band Six of CET, Band Four and Band Eight of TEM, TOFLE and GRE all contain listening comprehension. Therefore, improving lis
4、tening ability is a problem most English learners are faced with.2. Importance of listening comprehensionListening comprehension is a rather complex mental process, and it is a central subject that linguists, psychologists and teachers are studying. Listening is one of the fundamental language skill
5、s (Bulletin, 1952, cited in Hui, 2004). It plays an important role both in our daily life and in language learning. Its a medium through which children, young people and adults gain a large portion of their education, their information, their understanding of the world and of human affairs, their id
6、eals, sense of values and their appreciation(Arif,2005). Listening ability is essential among the five basic skills-listening, speaking, reading, writing and translating. In foreign language learning, the improvement of listening ability can reduce the difficulties which the learners meet in speakin
7、g, spelling and reading. According to Gary(1975),there are four advantages: cognitive advantage, efficient advantage, affective advantage and utilitarian advantage in foreign language teaching and learning if listening is considered as the priority and the first importance(cited in Hui, 2004).To be
8、exact, cognitive advantage refers to that learning foreign language techniques and knowledge by listening is the natural way for students. Efficient advantage is that emphasis of listening can promote the learning efficiency because the learners can attach much importance to storing more language kn
9、owledge such as spelling, reading, writing, and communicating instead of wasting their time on the improper mechanical speaking practice if they learn the foreign language by listening to the natural correct and authentic materials. Affective advantage which is also called psychological advantage me
10、ans that some kind of psychological pressure will occur to the learners if speaking has the priority to listening since they may wonder if their speaking is correct, this will not happen if listening is learnt first. The last is the utilitarian advantage, which means that the learners use more liste
11、ning when they communicate. This is further supported by Cooper (1988) who shows that there are at least forty-two percent of time on listening, thirty-two percent on speaking, fifteen percent on reading and about eleven percent on writing in daily communication if a normal person is awake. Therefor
12、e, studying listening comprehension and improving learners listening ability become a significant and pressing task for foreign language teachers and researchers.Therefore, as a language skill, listening comprehension should by no means be overlooked for the increasing need of communication.With the
13、 recognition of important role of listening comprehension in the second language learning, more and more researchers began to study the factors affecting listening comprehension in order to improve the proficiency of listening ability of learners.3. An important factor affecting listening comprehens
14、ion-short-term memory Rubin(1994)made a comprehensive review of the second language listening comprehension research in the past decades，from which emerged five major factors that other researchers believe to be of great influence on listening comprehension:(l)text characteristics; (2)interlocutor c
15、haracteristics; (3)task characteristics; (4)1istener characteristics;(5)process characteristics. Of these factors，more attention has been paid to the characteristics of 1istening task，listener and listening process. Based on these factors, various teaching techniques, listening skills and listening
16、strategies were studied and applied to foreign language teaching and learning. The working model of listening comprehension process contributes more to explaining the process of listening comprehension. It helps to understand the nature of listening comprehension and make the relative studies go fur
17、ther.However, college students often find that listening skill is the most difficult one of all the five basic language skills. In the field of English language teaching in China, teaching of listening comprehension is relatively weak. As for some teachers, the model of the teaching of listening sti
18、ll remains the traditional one: Explain the new words play the tapes do the exercises check the answer Nowadays, the situation has changed slightly after the efforts of many students, teachers and researchers studies on the learning and teaching of listening for a long time. Today, many teachers hav
19、e realized the importance of the teaching of listening skills and strategies. Meanwhile, students have paid much more attention to the study of listening comprehension. Now, some students can identify the words and utterances after repeated practice. But, there is still a vital problem that even tho
20、ugh students may be able to recognize each word of an utterance as it is spoken, there is no enough time to comprehend the input linguistic data before the inputs disappear. In other words, students may not be able to hold lengthy utterances in mind long enough to interpret them when they are doing
21、the listening comprehension. So most of them will feel upset and lose patience and confidence in the rest of the content. It shows that students dont grasp the nature of listening comprehension and the capacity of short-term memory of the listener is comparatively small. Therefore, a very challengin
22、g task that falls on English teachers is to try our best to make further study on solving the problem mentioned above.3.1 Short-term memoryIt is clear that memory plays a very important role in listening process, which has been found by many psycholinguists and researchers. The development of inform
23、ation-processing theories reveals the nature of human memory and the role it plays in the acquisition of information. Like speech producing, listening comprehension is also performed within the constraints of our information-processing system whose perspective has dominated psychological studies of
24、memory for forty years. Since the late 1950s, numerous educational and cognitive psychologists have proposed different models of human information processing, attempting to understand and explain the complexity of human cognitive activity. Human memory began to be viewed as an organized and active s
25、ystem.Memory is made up of three parts: sensory store, short-term memory (STM) and long-term memory (LTM). Vivian Cook (2000) defined short-term memory as the memory used for keeping information for periods of time up to a few seconds. Information comes in from the environment through a series of se
26、nsory memory systems. The transitory sensory store preserves information for a few hundred milliseconds; then the information goes into an intermediate STM where it has to be rehearsed before it can go into a relatively permanent LTM. Information is lost within 20-30 seconds if it is not rehearsed i
27、n STM. One cant retain information in STM forever since new information would always be coming in and would push out old information from the limited STM. Once the message or information in an utterance is understood, the data may become part of LTM. The utterance itself is now no longer needed and
28、may fade from short-term memory. So STM is transient memory. It has a limited capacity, it can only retain about seven or so unrelated chunks once (a chunk is a meaningfully coded unit). So STM has two important characteristics. First, STM can contain at any one time seven, plus or minus two, “chunk
29、s” of information. But information is stored in STM quite briefly, and is then usually forgotten. Second, items remain in STM around twenty seconds. These unique characteristics, among others, suggest to researchers that STM is autonomous from sensory and long-term memory stores. In addition, anothe
30、r characteristic that is worth mentioning is that information is usually stored in STM in the form of sound, that is, what is stored in STM is the acoustic trace of the information.3.2 Studies on the role that short-term memory plays in listening comprehension Early studies help to clarify the relat
31、ionship between STM span and target language proficiency. First, the amount of target language input that can be successfully processed seems to increase as proficiency in the language increases. Second, knowledge of target language syntax seems to be an important factor in increasing the amount of
32、linguistic material that can be retained in STM. Third, memory span for random digits, while correlating positively but weakly with memory span for linguistic data and with language proficiency, seems to be an aspect of STM that contributes less in language processing and is not a good indicator of
33、overall language proficiency. More recent studies on the role of STM in language learning have concentrated on identifying the various components of auditory STM and their contributions to the processing of linguistic input. Call (1985) examines the relationship between auditory STM and listening sk
34、ill. And his study is designed to assess the contribution of STM for each of five types of auditory input (sentences in context, isolated sentence, random words, random digits and musical tones). The result of his study suggests that memory for syntactically arranged words is the best predictor of l
35、istening skill in this battery of tests and plays an important role in rendering input comprehensible. In China, Chen Wei(2005)explores the influence of memory on English listening comprehension and especially the role of memory in listening in Chinese learning context from information-processing pe
36、rspective，she finds that memory systems greatly affect foreign language listening comprehension. Based on the research findings, it is suggested that both the listeners memory capacity and the listening input play an important role in listening activities. Xu Fang (2005) studies the relationship of
37、STM, comprehensible input and listening comprehension of Chinese students who study English as foreign language. And the conclusion is that STM is the important component of listening comprehension and the memory for syntax benefits greatly comprehensible input.These recent studies help to clarify t
38、wo facts on the relationship between STM, especially the capacity of memory, and listening comprehension. First, both the listeners memory capacity and the listening input play an important role in listening activities. Second, the memory for syntax patterns is of benefit to the scores of a test of
39、listening comprehensions for the advanced foreign language learners. But the studies also have some limitations. One of them is that they only talk about the advanced learner and neglect the study for the beginner or the less proficient learners, especially Chinese college students.(According to the
40、 general level description by Language Training & Testing Center of Ministry of Education, most Chinese non-English major college student are not the advanced proficient learners. They belong to intermediate levels).This proves that teaching of listening has not paid attention to the less proficient
41、 learners. The reason is mainly that the listening ability of less proficient learner is hard to improve. But in fact, advanced learners have mastered some strategies of improving their listening ability consciously or unconsciously, and need less instruction, while it is the less proficient learner
42、s who need the instruction on how to listen efficiently.Language learners short-term memory is very important to his listening comprehension. So in order to improve listening comprehension the first and foremost thing we have to do is to improve learners short-term memory,4. Ways to improve short-te
43、rm memorySo far, we have brought light to the important role of STM in the process of listening comprehension. The research in second language acquisition suggest that during the process of listening comprehension, properly enlarging the capacity of STM can increase the total amount of input informa
44、tion by chunking them into bigger units, and save time and space for the analyses of the information in STM.4.1 Expanding the short-term memory by repetitionThe most important characteristic of a short-term store is that it retains information for only a limited amount of time and decays rapidly. In
45、 order to overcome this and retain information longer, information must be periodically repeated, or rehearsed-either by articulating it, or by mentally simulating such articulation. This continual repetition is called, by Baddeley, the phonological loop. In this way, the information will re-enter t
46、he short-term store and be retained for a further period. According to Baddeley, the loop is composed of two parts, one is the phonological store in which the information is stored and the other one is an articulator system based on inner speech. If the memory trace can be fed back into the system b
47、y repetition before it is faded, it then may re-enter the phonological store and thus be extended.What needs to be emphasized is the speed of articulation. Psycholinguists point out that the speed with which information travels round the loop determines how much can be remembered because the informa
48、tion is generally acknowledged to be kept in STM for just a few seconds if without repetition. Hence the faster hearers can repeat things, the more they can remember. Of course, a good and natural pronunciation is indispensable because STM sees pronunciation as vital to processing and incorrect pron
49、unciation may bring about a great error and even a failure in comprehension.4.2 Making use of dictation to extend the span of short-term memoryLanguage learners are no strangers to dictation, but unfortunately its function has long been underestimated and it is employed as a way of checking students accomplishment of their assignment instead of a means to help extend their memory span. Actually, dictation is a complex activity which involves the skill of listening, writing as well as knowledge