1. Introduction

English is one of the world#8217;s common language and an important tool for international communication. As we all know, English study consists of listening, speaking, reading and writing. Among them, listening comprehension plays a critical part, which takes up as much as 50% of our daily communication. Furthermore, it is the main channel of classroom instruction and the most widely used language skill both at work and at home. Gradually, a growing number of teachers and students pay much attention to improve their listening ability on account of the importance of listening comprehension. According to the previous researches, there exist some factors which influence English listening comprehension, for example, vocabulary, speed, accent and so on. This research will mainly focus on the effects of accents and difficulty levels on English learners#8217; listening comprehension.

1.1 Need for the study

As a ”main ability” and a ”communication bridge”, English listening comprehension has become more and more important in schools and our society. Although the basic English skills include listening, speaking, reading and writing, but in China the four skills have not developed at the same rate. For most students listening and speaking remain the most difficult skills to master. Therefore, to cultivate students#8217; ability of listening is the first and foremost requirement of English teaching in high school in our country (Yu, 2003).

The famous linguist Rivers (1978) once pointed that, in our daily life, listening accounts for 45%, speaking takes up 30%, reading occupies 16% and writing just accounts for 9%. The statistic indicates that effective listening comprehension is one of the guarantees to carry out successful communication and it should be considered as the most important in English learning. Goh (1997) also pointed out a common cognitive problem in the listening process is that the learners are familiar with the words, but they cannot think of the corresponding meaning immediately. Maybe, the reason is that the learners cannot match the sound they have heard with the letters symbols which have been stored in memory, and are lacking in the conversion ability between pronunciation and shape.

In recent years, a lot of studies have been carried out to investigate accents, and most of them are on the effects of foreign accents on native#8217;s listening comprehension (Anderson, 1988), the relationship between accents and reading ability (Guan, 2009), listeners#8217; cognition and reactions to natives#8217; accents or Asian accents (Hosoda, 2007) and the development of phonetic study in language teaching and learning (Lin, 2012; Wu, 2007; Xia, 2009). Particularly, a lot of researchers have found out that empirical studies and analysis of different accents play a critical role in the English learners#8217; listening teaching, but there are fewer findings yielded in analyzing the effects of Chinese and American accents and difficulty levels on listening comprehension, which leads to the absence of pointed measures to English learners#8217; listening. As a result, the research needs to be carried out in the prospective of relationship and differences between Chinese and American accents and difficulty levels on the listening comprehension.

1.2 Research purpose

In light of the importance of the English listening comprehension for students, together with the important role of the accents in listening process, the author decides to do some research into the effects of Chinese and American accents and difficulty levels among English learners on their listening comprehension.

More specifically, this study intends to find out whether there is any significant difference between Chinese and American accents and difficulty levels among English learners. In addition, hopefully the findings of this study are valuable to English learners on English listening comprehension by offering them some useful suggestions.

2. Literature review

Listening comprehension, as one of the receptive skills, is the foundation to develop other language skills in English learning. Because of its importance and necessity, there have been plenty of related studies. Meanwhile, foreign accents have also drawn quite a lot of attentions from the academic circles. Therefore, in this research the effects of Chinese and American accents and difficulty levels on English listening comprehension for English learners will be analyzed. Generally in this chapter, literature is reviewed in three parts, first on the definitions of phonetics and listening comprehension, second on the related studies concerning the accents, difficulty levels and listening comprehension, and third on the existing problems in the previous studies.

2.1 Definitions

2.1.1 The definition of phonetics

Phonetics is an essential part of language. According to Wikipedia, phonetics is a branch of linguistics that comprises the study of the sounds of human speech, or in the case of sign languages#8212;the equivalent aspects of sign. It is concerned with the physical properties of speech sounds or signs (phones): their physiological production, acoustic properties, auditory perception, and neurophysiologic status.

The field of phonetics is a multilayered subject of linguistics that focuses on speech. It looks at speech sounds from three distinct but related points of view: articular phonetics, auditory phonetics and acoustic phonetics respectively. Now there are many variants of English accents, which possess their own pronunciation characteristics.

2.1.2 The definition of listening comprehension

Listening comprehension is a complex process of understanding speech in a second or foreign language. What the listener wants to achieve is an adequate understanding of what the speaker means (Brown, 1990). In human communication, listeners not only listen to others, but also have to comprehend what others talk about. That is what is called listening comprehension. Listening comprehension includes the auditory perception and all sorts of cognitive competence in attaining the goal of understanding.

However, different people give different definitions about listening. According to Michael Rost (2002), every definition of listening has some unique aspects. The definition of listening can be understood in four orientations, the receptive, the constructive, the collaborative and the transformative. Michael#8217;s definition of listening is that listening is experiencing contextual effects. In Underwood#8217;s (1989) understanding, listening is ”the activity of paying attention to and trying to get meaning from something we hear”. In simple way to students, listening means catching what the speaker says.

From the description above, the author concludes it as follows: different accents influence understanding in listening comprehension process. Despite the multilayer and complexity of phonetics and listening comprehension, however, the research intends to find a connection between accented speech and listening comprehension.

2.2 Related studies concerning the accents, difficulty levels and listening comprehension

In the past twenty years, the research for English accents has been a hot issue in the field of psychological linguistics. Most related researches (Huang, 1995; Wang, 2008; Cargile, 1997) mainly focused on the development of phonological awareness and the relationship between phonological awareness and reading, spelling, attitudes, etc. Meanwhile, many researches have also proved that there is correlative relationship between the reading comprehension and the phonological awareness for children (Beth, 2008; Guan, 2009).

Eisenstein and Berkowitz (1981) showed clearly that English learners more easily understood their native-accented English than either foreign-accented English. Obviously, learners had a distinct advantage in listening comprehension and intelligibility when the speaker shared the listener#8217;s accent. Wilcox (1978) had also demonstrated this argument, who concluded that Singaporean learners of English found speakers of their own accent background easier to understand than speakers from different accent backgrounds.

Otherwise, more persuasive evidence has confirmed those previous findings that familiar accented speech is easier to understand. Tauroza and Luk (1997) argued that familiarity with a certain foreign accent was a significant point to listening comprehension. Gass and Varonis (1984) also found that familiarity with a foreign accent was a key factor in listening comprehension, in addition to the listener#8217;s familiarity with the speaker, with nonnative speech in general, and with a given topic.

In addition, some researchers (Goh, 1999; Brindley, 2002; Bacon, 1992) had studied the effect of materials#8217; difficulty on listening comprehension. Zheng (2010) also had mentioned that topic familiarity and different difficulty levels affected listening comprehension. In his study, participants were arranged to listen to news reports respectively from China Daily(at the easy difficulty level) and Voice of America(at the difficult difficulty level). According to the result of a paired-sample T test, the researcher found that news reports in China Daily were significantly easier to understand than listening materials in Voice of America. Brindley (2002) had also found that the difficulty had its effect upon the listening comprehension.

Through the previous related studies, to a certain extent, we can see that accents or difficulty levels do make effect on English reading or listening comprehension; meanwhile, most research subjects are children, and little study is done with the adult learners of English as a foreign language. So the author intends to research the relationship and effects between accents and difficulty levels on listening comprehension and took the non-English majors as the main subject to explore the contribution of Chinese and American accents and difficulty levels to the listening comprehension.

2.3 Problems in the previous studies

In the past few decades, more and more scholars come into notice the necessities of studying the effects of the accents on listening comprehension. However, there still exist some problems in the previous studies.

Firstly, from the previous studies, we could easily learn that researches into the effects of accents on listening comprehension are relatively scarce and fewer findings have been yielded, compared with those on phonological awareness or listening comprehension. In addition, some researches had only studied the effect of difficulty levels on listening comprehension, not mentioning that the effect between accents and difficulty levels on English learners#8217; listening. Furthermore, there is much fewer researches referring to the relationship between the Chinese and American accents on English listening comprehension.

Secondly, some studies focused on the development, the theoretical analysis of different English accents (Li, 2009; Zhang, 2004), lacking practical measures. In addition, there have been no clear findings to the effect of accents on listening comprehension. Some prefer to the native accent which is rather easily understood, some tend to that familiar accented speech (native and nonnative) and others are not very clear.

In brief, there are still many insufficiencies in the previous studies, which promote the current study to the effects of Chinese and American accents and difficulty levels on listening comprehension.

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Phonetics - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonetics