1.3　Studies of English News Listening Abroad and at Home

Though English news listening has been a critical point in English study，there are still few studies concerning it either at home or abroad.Next is some relative research on news listening comprehension done by a few scholars.

1.3.1　Studies of English News Listening Abroad

Anderson(1998)divided English listening comprehension into three related stages:perceptual processing，parsing process and utilization process.During the first stage，the purpose of the listeners is to listen to voice and divide these received voice information into meaningful units.Once these useful units are recognized by mind，they will be stored in the mind in the forMof word.According to hiMthe second stage is actually the psychological process of forming words，vocabularies and some other meanings of language fragment.In the last stage the listeners will collocate the general schema of the materials in theirminds with their present knowledge.

Foreign scholars always introduce the new theories of cognition into English news listening when they do listening research theymainly apply Metacongnitive Strategy and Schema Theory into their English listening teaching.The conceptof Metacongnition has been put forward by American psychologist Flavell(1979)refers to their own recognition and monitoring of their cognitive activities.

Christine Goh(1997)did a research on news listening comprehension and found the learners had greatmetacongnitive awareness and they understood the factors promoting and hindering news listening comprehension.At the same time，Goh gained learners’oral report by group interview and discovered the factors influencing the learners’listening among which the most common ones includes vocabulary，background knowledge，speed and the forMof input.Therefore，Goh reached a conclusion that awareness of metacognition had an impact on learners’listening ability.

Vandergift(1999)did a research on the students by employing the method of sound thinking and found the relationship between the type of listening and the language level，sex，listening competence，listening style and some other factors.The result indicates that the use of listening strategy has a significant relationship with listening competence and language level.Successful learners tend to use listening strategy during their news listening.In addition，Vandergift emphasized the importance of strategy in the teaching of listening comprehension and considered Metacongnitive Strategy plays an importance role in improving learners’news listening comprehension.

Jane Willis(1996)presented several strategies influencing news listening:

a)Predicting and guessing:Whatare people going to talk about？Just tell students to use common sense.If students have known froMthe first sentence that the conversation is about what，then they will search the relative words in mind.Firstly，students should get themselves familiar with the content of passage.If a whole passage concerns about geography，then the unknown wordmust has something to do with geography.Teachers should help theMdiscover the main direction before guessing.

b)Identifying key points:Neglecting irrelevant information.There are always some interfering sentences.Students should try to flee theirmind froMthe obstacles.

c)Noting discourse marks:Such as“well，first of all，next，another is and now，finally”.This is the framework of a passage.It will be the significant step for us to get themain idea.

d)Recognizing cohesive devices，like“such as，which”，including link words，pronouns，reference，etc.This category ofword indicates the detail will appear.

1.3.2　Studies of English News Listening at Home

For a long time，English news listening has been neglected by many Chinese scholars.And up to now，only a few investigations have been made in this field.Next are several scholarswho had engaged in such field.

Zhang Zhiyong(2010)froMXinan University discussed some strategies for improving news listening comprehension in his Master’s Thesis.Based on his questionnaire he summarized some effective strategies in order to give a hand in raising learners’news listening comprehension.According to his investigation，he found that students spent less time on news listening and suggested that the motivation of listening news is a critical point.Stimulating learning motivation can increase their initiative and consciousness of listening.Besides，he proposed that schema was an important factor influencing learners’news listening comprehension，thus he also recommended that the students should not just be taught only froMthe aspects of voice，tone，vocabulary and simple background information，but to guide the learners’to have the construction of news listening language and cultural schema.

Feng Lijun(2005)discussed about the factors affecting students’news listening comprehension.Through questionnaire and interviews she discovered that learning strategy as one of the most important factors influencing learners’news listening comprehension should be the study object.She also maintains that the reason why the students can not have a high efficiency of study in the process of news listening

Chen Xiao(2003)also made some relative investigation in news listening.In his study she firstly concludes teaching is that the learning strategy，especially the one concerning news listening comprehension has not been attached importance by the English teachers.Thus，her study is just around the learning strategy which she considered as one of the most significant aspect affecting students’news listening comprehension.And some features of news according to which she has accordingly summarized for learning strategies in for news listening comprehension.At first he suggests the Metacongnitive strategy including focus strategy，guess strategy and schema construction strategy is an effectivemethod for improving students’news listening ability.What’smore，in his guess strategy he mentioned these three aspects:Guess through the lead，guess through the key words，guess through discourse markers.However，she just realized theses sides which influencing news listening comprehension，she didn’t present a detailed description for the learners to improve through these methods.

Mu Baizhi(2002)devoted his research to the study of English majors’news listening comprehension.In his study，froMthe practical problems encountered during news listening comprehension to the two major difficulties including the lack of news vocabulary and the understanding of news genre in the process of students’news listening—Based on the features of news style he also discussed the relationship between leaning strategy and news listening comprehension froMthe perspective of cognition and put forward some corresponding strategies.The first strategy he suggests is the combination of reading and listening and also the reading of news report which he considered should be applied into teaching.Besides，the second point brought forth by hiMis that reading and purposely remembering news vocabulary is one of the common methods of expanding the learners’vocabulary.However，a lot of listening practice is required to transfer the mastered vocabulary into news listening vocabulary.Lastly，he maintained that the background information is at the same time should be valued very much during news listening comprehension，for it can help the listeners have a better understanding of the listening materials concerning the relative information prepared in theirminds.

This chapter mainly copes withthe literature review of discourse markers and news listening，including the definition and some related studies both in China and abroad.Now we know that people use discourse markers frequently in communication，especially in spoken and written English.And until now，there have been somany achievements in this area，but these achievements aremainly about the theories，functions of discourse markers and their application in reading and writing，few researches have been carried out to find out the relationship between discourse markers and listening comprehension，especially the effect of discourse markers on news listening comprehension，which is universal both in practice and theory in all languages and cultures.Besides，news listening has just been studied froMthe general perspective of Metaconginition，cognition and schema，there is not a detailed learning strategy introduced to the students for news listening comprehension.This paper will study the relationship between discourse markers and news listening comprehension and the effect of discourse markers on news listening comprehension in detail.The following chapters will introduce the theory based on which the survey of this thesis is carried out.