An analysis of English majors speech perception problems

Shujing Zhang

Abstract

For English learners, listening has its special importance among the four language skills. While it is the basic form of communication and foundation for developing other language skills, listening is usually regarded as the most difficult part among all kinds of English examinations. Dictation tests are now used as an economical and valid method to investigate English learners’ listening difficulties. It can test learners’ ability in phoneme discrimination, mastery of vocabulary and grammar, etc. In the process of analysis, each sentence of the students’ version is compared with the original version to find out the differences which can be seen as errors. Then all the errors are collected and classified based on their distinctive features. Through the explicit description of learners’ speech perception error patterns and the application of SPSS to identify the correlation of listening and pronunciation, some suggestions for English listening teaching and learning are put forward based on the above analyses