论文总字数：28276字

摘 要

1. Introduction 1

1.1 Need for the study 1

1.2 Research purpose 1

2. Literature review 3

2.1 Speaking rates and listening comprehension 3

2.2 Difficulty and listening comprehension 3

2.3 Problems in the previous studies 5

3. Methodology 6

3.1 Research questions 6

3.2 Participants 6

3.3 Listening materials and tasks 6

3.4 Data collection 7

3.5 Data analysis 7

4. Results and discussions 9

4.1 Results 9

4.1.1 Descriptive statistics for speaking rates and difficulty levels 10

4.1.2 A mixed ANOVA for listening comprehension…………………………11

4.2 Discussions 12

5．Conclusions 14

5.1 Major findings of the study 14

5.2 Implications and limitations 14

5.3 Limitations and suggestions for future research 15

References 16

Acknowledgements

The writing of this paper is one of the real challenges I have ever encountered in my life and it is an outcome of support, encouragement and love I received from so many people. Here I would like to take the opportunity to express my heartfelt thanks to those who have contributed, directly and indirectly, to the completion of this paper.

My deepest gratitude goes to my supervisor, Professor Lu Junhua, for her painstaking effort in guiding me through the various stages of writing this paper. Through the whole working period on the paper, she helped me choose the topic, collect the data, and analyze the data with the software. If it were not for her patient guidance, continuous encouragement and generous support, I could not have made this work possible. Furthermore, it is my honor to benefit a lot from her personalities and diligence, which I will treasure in my whole life.

I would like to thank all the other teachers for their enlightenment, knowledge, encouragement and help throughout my undergraduate study at Nanjing Tech University.

Special thanks go to my dear friends and fellow students, who have accompanied me throughout the years at the university.

Last but not least, I would like to extend my sincere thanks to my parents for their love and support all these years.

Abstract

The present study investigates effects of British accent at different speaking rates and difficulty levels on listening comprehension. The specific research questions are as follows:

1. Is there any effect of different speaking rates on listening comprehension?

2. Is there any effect of difficulty levels on listening comprehension?

3. Does the effect of different speaking rates on listening comprehension vary according to difficulty levels?

The experiment was administered to 56 freshmen of English majors, coming from two paralled classes in Nanjing Tech University. Accordingly, they were assigned to one of two groups. Group one listened to the listening materials at normal speed which is equivalent to the speed of BBC (130-150 wpm). While group two listened to the same listening materials at slower speed that is equivalent to the speed of VOA Standard (about 120 wpm). Each listening paper includes 4 passages: 2 easy ones and 2 difficult ones. They are recorded by a native British teacher and a native American teacher respectively. In this way, we got one easy and one difficult passage in British accent. All the students were asked to finish the listening comprehension tests within 20 minutes. Then the researcher collected the data and applied mixed ANOVA of SPSS21.0 to conduct analysis to answer the research questions, and the results are as follows:

1. Different speaking rates has a significant effect on British listening comprehension. Moreover, the group in slower speed performs better than the group in normal speed in listening comprehension.

2. There is a significant effect of difficulty levels on British listening comprehension. Mixed ANOVA shows that participants with easy materials perform better than those whose listened to difficult materials on British English listening comprehension.

3. There is no significant interaction between different speaking rates and difficulty levels when it comes to British English comprehension.

Key words: listening comprehension; different speaking rates; difficulty levels.

中文摘要

本文旨在研究不同语速与难度的英国口音对听力的影响。具体研究问题如下：

1、不同语速对英音听力理解是否有影响？

2、不同难度对英音听力理解是否有影响？

3、语速和难度是否对听力理解产生交互效应？

本研究的受试者是56名来自南京工业大学两个英语专业自然班的大一新生。根据其班级，受试者随之分为2组。同样的听力材料，组一听正常语速, 相当于BBC语速（130-150词/分），组二听较慢语速，相当于VOA标准速（约120词/分）。听力材料包含四篇文章：两篇较难，两篇较简单。即不同语速的两篇听力材料又各含难易两种难度水平。受试者需在20分钟内完成听力理解测试。然后研究者收集数据并利用SPSS21中的方差分析，进一步分析回答之前提出的研究问题，结果如下：

1． 不同语速对英音听力理解有显著影响。此外，语速较慢的一组在听力理解方面表现明显优于正常语速的一组。

2. 不同难度材料对英音听力理解有显著影响。 结果表明，简单材料的被试者表现优于复杂材料的被试者。

3. 不同语速和难度对英音听力理解没有显著交互效应。语速不同的英音听力理解与材料难度没有显著关系。

关键词：听力理解 语速 难度

1. Introduction

Listening is one of the important skills in learning English. Accordingly, it also plays a crucial role in teaching English. As a result, English teachers have to pay more attentions to listening training. What’s more, in nowadays English tests, such as CET4, CET6, TEM4, TEM8 amp; GRE, British accent is widely used. It is believed that speaking rates affect listening comprehension. Therefore, we try to find the effects of British accent at different speaking rates on listening comprehension. Moreover, as for English major students, it will help them to achieve better performance in listening comprehension.

• 1. Need for the study

According to many previous studies, accents, difficulty of listening materials and speaking rates are thought to be important factors to listening comprehension. To be specific, British accent is the general dialect of English Language in Great Britain (Pike, 2001), or, more broadly, throughout the British Isles.

When it comes to difficulty of listening materials, the fundamental factors are beyond count. Such as the mastery of the basic grammar, the accuracy of pronunciation and intonation, the English learners’ sensitiveness to the materials (Bu, 2009).

What’s more, speaking rate has a great influence on listening comprehension (Liu, 2012). So far much research has been done on the effect of speech rates on listening comprehension (Abdolmajid, 2010). Little research, however, has been done to explore the relationship between difficulty and speaking rate on a certain accent listening comprehension. Accordingly, the effects of British accent at different speaking rates on listening comprehension are the research focus of the current study.

• 1. Research purpose

The present study intends to investigate effects of British accent at different speaking rates and difficulty levels on listening comprehension. Specifically speaking, the purpose of this study is to find out whether there is any effect of different speaking rates and difficulty levels on British Listening Comprehension?

2. Literature review

English listening ability is a basic part in the college English teaching. As the main criterion to affect English listening, accent and speaking rates have drawn quite a lot of attentions in the previous studies. In this study, the effects of British accent at different speaking rates on listening comprehension will be analyzed. And in this chapter, literature is reviewed in three parts: first, previous researches on accents and listening comprehension; second, those on speaking rate and listening comprehension; and third, on the problems in the previous studies.

2.1 Speaking rates and listening comprehension

Speaking rates affect listening comprehension greatly. Griffiths (1990) studied the effect of speech rate on comprehension of a semi-scientific text that was read aloud at three different speech rate levels and found that moderately fast speech rates reduced comprehension, but a slow rate of delivery did not increase comprehension significantly as compared to speech delivered at a normal rate. In another descriptive study, Griffiths (1991) stated that language learners were likely to meet a far greater speed of rates than the rates investigated in the earlier study. In a similar study but with different materials, Griffiths (1992) conducted an experiment on 24 Omani elementary school teachers for a five-week course. He provided three story passages with three different speech rates: slow speech rates, average speech rates, and fast speech rates. Based on the participants’ scores in listening comprehension, he concluded that a slower rate of delivery resulted in better comprehension scores than fast and average rates.

In Huei-chun’s (2001) study, he investigated the effects of syntactic modification and speech rate on EFL listening comprehension. Four versions of the listening passage on syntactic modification with two different speech rates are used to conduct this study. Huei-chun assigned 168 college freshmen to one of the eight experimental groups. After completing the test, the results confirm the significant syntactic. The study offers empirical evidences for the facilitating effects of syntactic modification and slower speech rate.

Liu (2012) designed an listening comprehension experiment with two different speaking rates: normal speed (250 syllables per minute) and lower speed (70 syllables per minute). 80 students were assigned into 4 groups. This experiment aims at finding the effect of listening implicit learning on different speaking rates. By giving the control of speech rate, he found that students’ s listening comprehension improved more at normal speed.

Abdolmajid (2010) examined the effect of speech rate on listening comprehension of Iranian EFL learners. Initially, a sample of 108 sophomore EFL learners majoring in English translation was selected based on systematic random sampling from Abadan Islamic Azad University. Then, based on an ECCE proficiency test, 62 participants were chosen and divided into two homogeneous groups of 31. One group had exposure to natural speech rate and the other to slow speech rate of listening materials. After thirteen academic sessions, the results o the paired t-test regarding the pre-tests and post-tests of the two group means showed that both differences (group one: –2.83 and group two: –1.22) were significant at 0.05 levels (P lt; 0.05). These findings suggest that each speech rate, whether natural or slow, could improve EFL learners listening comprehension; however, natural speech rate could demonstrate greater improvements than slow speech rate in EFL learners’ listening comprehension.

2.2 Difficulty levels and listening comprehension

According to previous studies, learners perform variously while listening to materials with different degrees of difficulty. Xu (2006) investigated factors which affect listening comprehension. The complexity of the sentence, memory and type can affect listening comprehension. Peng(2013) found that variables that affected item difficulty genres and the differences of item difficulty of different genres are investigated with regression and analysis and ANOVA. Findings show that variables of listen ability alone could not be the most effective predictors of item difficulty. Therefore, test validity need to be constructed from multi-perspectives and multi-dimensions. 

2.3 Problems in the previous studies

In the past few decades, factors that affect listening comprehension have successfully attracted a lot of attentions and more and more scholars come into notice the necessities of studying the skills of listening comprehension. Among them, accents and speaking rates are two important factors to listening comprehension. However, there still exit some problems in the previous studies.

Firstly, we could easily learn that researches on the effects of different accents on listening comprehension are relatively scanty and fewer findings are yielded. In addition, there is fewer researches referring to the relationship between accent and speech rate when it comes to listening comprehension.

Secondly, difficulty of listening materials can affect listening comprehension. However, it is not included in the previous related researches. To sum up, there are still many insufficiencies in the previous studies, which call for the implement of the current study.

This study is to explore the effects of British English accent at different speaking rates on listening comprehension of different difficulty levels.

3. Methodology

3.1 Research questions

The present study investigates effects of British accent at different speaking rates and difficulty levels on listening comprehension. The specific research questions are as follows:

1. Is there any effect of different speaking rates on listening comprehension?

2. Is there any effect of difficulty levels on listening comprehension?

3. Does the effect of different speaking rates on listening comprehension vary according to difficulty levels?

3.2 Participants

The experiment was administered to 56 English majors from Nanjing Tech University. They are all freshmen who have never participated in the CET6. Under these conditions, subjects were randomly assigned to one of two groups (They come from two paralled classes with the same background ).

3.3 Listening materials and tasks

In this study, the listening materials were selected from CET6. All the participants are freshmen, and the listening materials could be appropriate for the subjects. Considering the difficulties of the listening materials, we adopted Readability to test all the 10 listening passages, then we chose 4 out of the 10 with a pretest. According to the results of Readability and our pretest, we divided the listening materials into two levels, which were appropriate for the participants to listen to. Two easy materials got lower scores in the readability stool (10.89 and 13.69 in Fog Scale Level) and students got higher scores in the pretest. While two difficult materials performs conversely (13.72 and 17.84 in Fog Scale Level). Two passages out of four passages were recorded in Standard British English. The lengths of these passages were approximately equal in these passages. In this way, listening materials were selected to be recorded in the task.

The test of this study had two levels: the listening test at normal speed（130-150 wpm）and the listening test at slower speed (about 120 wpm). We invited a native British speaker with 20 years’ teaching experience to record the listening materials at two rates: normal speed and lower speed. In this case, we have four passages: 2 easy materials at slower speed and normal speed, 2 difficult materials at slower speed and at normal speed.

3.4 Data collection

The subjects in this study were 56 freshmen of English majors from two classes. According to their classes, the 56 subjects were divided into two groups with each about 28 members. Consequently, class one listened to the 2 passages recorded at normal speed, and class two listened to the other 2 passages recorded at slower speed After the listening test, all the students were asked to write their answers on the answer sheet. Then the researcher collected the data for analyzing. For these passages, each one includes four questions. And one point for each question. The first group stood for the normal speeding group, whose total score ranges from 44 to 69, and the second group represented slower speeding group, whose total score ranges from 59 to 88.

3.5 Data analysis

Analysis of the listening materials: applying readability and SPSS V21.0 to obtain the difficulty of the materials. In this way, listening materials were divided apart. We have both easy and difficult listening materials.

After gaining all the dataset, the researcher applied SPSS V21.0 to make mixed ANOVA to answer the research questions.

4. Results and discussions

This chapter is composed of two major sections. The first section reports the statistical results of this study to address the research questions. The second section discusses the major findings.

4.1 Results

There are two research questions in the study. Section 4.1.1 reports the results of different speaking rates, and Section 4.12 reports those with difficulty levels, with the results of mixed ANOVA, including mean difference, standard deviation, standard error mean, degree of freedom and significance level. In this chapter, data were analyzed to answer the questions one by one.

Table 4.1 Descriptive statistics for listening comprehension

As shown in Table 4.1, group 2 had a higher mean scores of 3.14 than Group1 2.42 with easy materials on listening comprehension. When listened to difficult listening materials group 2 get 2.10 mean scores while group 1 get 1.57. Thus, the subjects who listened to the listening materials at slower speed performed better than those who listened to the listening materials at normal speed no matter the materials are easy or difficult.

4.1.1 Descriptive statistics for speaking rates and difficulty levels

Table 4.2 Test of between-subjects effects

As shown in Table 4.3, group 2, there is a significant difference between speed at normal and slower speed, f=11.441, p=.001, η²=.175. Speaking rates is one of the factors that influence listening comprehension, and it indicates that students in group 2 (at slower speed) perform better than group 1 ( at normal speed).

4.1.2 A mixed ANOVA for listening comprehension

Table 4.3 Test of within-subjects effects

To break the results up into more delineated sections, we divided these listening materials into different difficulty levels. Passage 1 was easier than passage 3 according to the results of pretest and readability. As Table 4.3 shows, there is a significant difference between easy and difficult materials. f=39.605, p=.000, η²=.423,. And there was no significant interaction between difficulty and speed, f=.352, p=.555gt;.05, η²=.006

4.2 Discussions

The results shown above can be summarized into mainly as follows. A comparison of EFL learners’ listening comprehension in different speaking rates showed a significant difference. The result has shed light on the following discussions.

From the data analysis, we can conclude that there is significant difference in correctly understanding listening materials between the groups at slow and normal speed at the same difficulty level, no mater the listening material is easy or difficult. In other words, group in slower speaking rates performs better in listening comprehension.

The statistics have shown that the learners who listened to slower materials did significantly better than those who listened to normal speed in listening comprehension. Griffiths (1990) studied the effect of speech rate on comprehension of a semi-scientific text that was read aloud at three different speech rate levels and found that moderately fast speech rates reduced comprehension, but a slow rate of delivery did not increase comprehension significantly as compared to speech delivered at a normal rate. In a similar study but with different materials, Griffiths (1992) conducted an experiment on three story passages with three different speech rates: slow speech rates, average speech rates, and fast speech rates. Based on the participants’ scores in listening comprehension, he concluded that a slower rate of delivery resulted in better comprehension scores than fast and average rates. The finding of the present study supports the latter conclusion.

Besides , In Huei-chun’s (2001) study, he investigated the effects of syntactic modification and speech rate on EFL listening comprehension. Four versions of the listening passage on syntactic modification with two different speech rates are used to conduct this study. Huei-chun assigned 168 college freshmen to one of the eight experimental groups. After completing the test, the results confirm the significant syntactic. The study offers empirical evidences for the facilitating effects of syntactic modification and slower speech rate.

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