1．结合毕业设计（论文）课题情况，根据所查阅的文献资料，每人撰写2000字左右的文献综述：

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#8217;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.

1.1 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 listening comprehension, the fundamental factors are beyond count. Such as the mastery of the basic grammar, the accuracy of pronunciation and intonation, the English learners#8217; sensitiveness to the materials (Bu, 2009). Among numerous factors, 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 accent and speaking rate. Accordingly, the effects of British accent at different speaking rates on listening comprehension are the research focus of the current study.

1.2 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 significant difference in British English listening comprehension at different speaking rates with materials of different difficulty levels.

2. Literature review

English listening ability is a basic part in the college English teaching. As the main criterion to affect English listening, speaking rates and difficulty levels have drawn quite a lot of attentions in the previous studies. In this study, effects of British accent at different speaking rates and difficulty levels on listening comprehension will be analyzed. And in this chapter, literature is reviewed in three parts: first, previous researches on speaking rates and listening comprehension; second, those on difficulty levels 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#8217; 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#8217;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#8217; 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: #8211;2.83 and group two: #8211;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#8217; listening comprehension.

2.2 Difficulty level 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 effects of British accent at different speaking rates and difficulty levels on listening comprehension.

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