How to Improve the Students Listening AbilityAbstract: Listening skill is the comprehensive skill. Nowadays college students pay more attention to English listening during their study of English at college since they fully understand that the successful communications with others in English based being able to listen and understand. But its difficult to master the skills of listening. In order to improve the listening ability, the students should study hard, of course the teachers should teach listening effectively. Listening is a process, there are many difficulties in that, for example: the sounds, the vocabulary, the sentence structures, and find out the main idea or the topic and make inferences and so onIt is necessary to find out some methods and how to solute by teachers flexibility in class.Therefore a very challenging task that falls on teachers who teach English listening is how to improve the students listening ability.Key words: Listening Comprehension, Sounds, Vocabulary, the Sentence Structure摘 要：听力教学是项综合性较强的技能，自从学生了解到成功的交际英语是取决于听并领会他人的意思之后，当今大学生越来越关注英语听力在他们学英语的两年期间，但是听力技巧较难掌握,因此提高听力不仅要学生自身的努力,而且还要英语教师进行有效的教导。听力是一个过程，其中存在很多困难，例如：语音、词汇，句子结构，找出大概意思和推断等等。找出相应的解决方法是必须的。这些问题教师如何灵活地在课堂在解决。怎样有效提高听力这门课程一项艰巨任务落在我们听力老师身上,关键词：听力理解；语音；词汇；句子结构ContentsAbstracti摘要iiContentsiiiIntroduction11. Listening processes12. Listening Problems22.1 Problem in the Sounds32.2 Problem in the Vocabulary42.3 Problem in the sentence structure52.4 Problem in the main idea or the topic62.5 Problem in the inferences73. The causes of listening problems 83.1 Problems caused by sounds9 3.2 Problems caused by vocabulary11 3.3 Problems caused by sentence structure11 3.4 Problems caused by making inferences and the main idea12Conclusion 13Bibliography15Acknowledgement16IntroductionNow most of the students do better in reading and writing in their English study, but they can hardly communicate. Listening is quite different from reading when they do reading. The students can understand the meaning of the words, but when they do listening, it is usually difficult for them to interpret the meaning of the words, phrases and sentences, because of the seed or different cultures. 1Therefore the main task for the teacher is to improve the students listening ability, we should make use of various effective methods to motivate the students interest, and let the students practice more in and out of class. What. discussed in the article will be helpful to English learners1. Listening processesTo help students to acquire the English listening ability, we need first to understand what happens when we listen. Mary Underwood (1989) points out that the listening process consists of three stages. 2A: The sounds go into a sensory store, often called the echoic memory, and an organized in to meaningful units, according to the knowledge of the language the listener already has.B: Words or groups of words are checked and compared with information already held in the long-term memory and the meaning is extracted from them.C: After the listener has constructed a meaning from the utterance (which may or may not be the meaning that was intended by the speaker), he or she might transfer the information to the long-term memory for later use. It seems that generally listener who wants to do these records the message and stores it in the long-term memory in a reduced form. The problem is that each of the three stages happen within a few seconds. Thus the foreign language learner may be unable to process the incoming stream fast enough and will fail to extract meaning from what they have heard.At present, the process based on the receiving of acoustic signals is referred to as bottom-up processing while the process based on the application of background knowledge and contextual information to make predictions is known as top-down processing. The success in listening comprehension depends on the interaction of these processes. Neither can be lacking.2. Listening ProblemsTo help students to acquire the English listening ability, we need also to know their level and identify where their problems lie in listening. In listening to an extended passage or dialogue, they tend to treat each sentence in isolation and hence fail to make an inference, which needs to be drawn from the context. Very often they fail to distinguish the topic sentence from the development details and as a result they are uncertain about the main idea of the listening text they have heard. Also, vocabulary and the long and complicated sent