【正文】 terview with some subjects. Then data collected was analysed qualitatively on the base of the findings. Strategies and suggestions are made concerning English learning and teaching. Hopefully, this research can provide some benefits for fiveyearprogram normal school students’ listening learning. Organization of the thesis The thesis is posed of six chapters. Chapter One is a brief introduction to the study which mainly includes the purpose, significance, necessity, methodology and organization of the study. Chapter Two serves as the literature review and theoretical basis. Chapter Three presents a detailed description of the way the study is conducted which contains the research question, the subjects, the instrument, data collection and data analysis. Chapter Four reports and discusses the results of the study. Based on the major findings, implications and suggestions are made in Chapter Five. Chapter Six makes a conclusion on the whole thesis. Chapter Two Literature Review amp。 Theoretical Basis Literature review The development of listening pedagogy Every so often, listening es into fashion. In the 1950s and 1960s when the Audiolinguial Method became dominant in foreign language teaching, listening was separated from other skills and became an independent learning part. This method saw listening as a “decoding” process, but still a passive, receptive skill, serving for speaking. The emphasis on oral language skills gave it a boost. It became fashionable again in the 1980s, when Krashen’s (1982) ideas about prehensible input gained prominence. A short time later, it was reinforced by James Asher’s (1988) Total Physical Response, a methodology drawing sustenance from Krashen’s work, and based on the belief that a second language is learned most effectively in the early stages if the pressure for production is taken off the learners. During the 1980s, proponents of listening in a second language were also encouraged by work in the first language field. Here, people such as Gillian Brown (see, for example, Brown, 1984。 Brown, 1990) were able to demonstrate the importance of developing oracy (the ability to listen and speak) as well as literacy, in school. Now with the development of human society, listening is not merely a “passive, receptive skill”, but a plicated interactive process. The teaching of listening bees the favorite of the linguists. Prior to this, it was taken for granted that first language speakers needed instruction in how to read and write, but not how to listen and speak. Research related listening prehension problemsThe research available on second language listening prehension is insufficient. There is little knowledge about how listening takes place. Comparing it with other language skills, Goh (1997: 161) states that, “there are fewer insights about the process of listening and the way it is learnt.” Similarly, Richards (1985:189) says that “there is little direct research on second language listening prehension.” We can say that this statement is still true despite the importance given to listening prehension (see Goh, 1997。 Brown, 1992。 Rost, 1994). The literature available on L2 listening includes empirical research (Oxford, 1993。 Rubin, 1994。 Flowerdew, 1994) as well as theoretical and pedagogical studies (Ur, 1984。 Rixon, 1986。 Mendelssohn amp。 Rubin, 1995). Research on second language listening has also attempted to point out the factors that may influence learners’ prehension (Dunkel, 1991。 Lynch, 1988。 Richards, 1985). Grant (1997) chooses four strategies that would help learners to listen to English: activating/building schema, guessing/inferring/predicting, listening selectively, and negotiating meaning.Considering various aspects of listening prehension, Underwood (1989) organizes the major listening problems as follows: l lack of control over the speed, at which speakers speak, l not being able to get things repeated, l the listener’s limited vocabulary, l failure to recognize the “signals,”l problems of interpretation, l inability to concentrate, and l establishing learning habits. Yagang (1994) attributes the difficulty of listening prehension to four sources: the message, the speaker, the listener and the physical setting. Flowerdew and Miller (1996) studied learners’ strategies and difficulties in listening to academic lectures. They found that students’ problems were speed of delivery, new terminology and concepts, difficulties in concentrating, and problems related to physical environment. Rubin (1994) identified five factors that affect listening prehension: text characteristics, interlocutor characteristics, task characteristics, listener characteristics, and process characteristics. Further research investigated the role of temporal factors facilitating or inhibiting successful listening (Boyle, 1984。 Higgins, 1997). Rixon (1986) insists that there are four main areas of listening difficulty for an EFL learner, namely the English structures with the weak relationship between English sounds and the meaning in language expressions in the context, changes in the sounds when they occur in rapid, connected speech with various tones, the rhythm pattern of English speech, and different ways of pronouncing the “same” sound. On the other hand, Ur (1984) actually classifies listening difficulties of the EFL learners into several categories as follows: l the problem of sounds which include pronunciation, rhythm, intonation and stress。 l lacking the ability to skim what is heard, which includes the inability to keep up with redundancy, noise, and the inability to guess。l lacking exposure and practice with different kinds of accents and colloquial vocabulary in specific texts, and practice with different kinds of accents and colloquial vocabulary。l inability to link words to the context, and unskillful in using strategies to summarize heard information at the macrolevel and microlevel. Focusing on EFL lear