Among the four basic skills of English learning: listening, speaking, reading and writing, listening is the most important way to acquire language information and sense, and it is the basis to improve other skills. Research shows that listening accounts for 45% of all verbal communication activities. It can be seen that listening training is helpful to improve students' English level in an all-round way. English teachers must pay enough attention to listening. But at present, students are generally comfortable with the written test, but they are afraid of the listening test. Why is listening comprehension so difficult? The author believes that it is caused by the following reasons.

First, lack of vocabulary.

It is generally believed that the more you listen, the better your listening comprehension will be. Of course, listening is indeed a positive means to improve listening, but the level of listening is not entirely determined by the number of times of listening, the length and difficulty of materials, it is a comprehensive embodiment of one's English knowledge, and the basis of all English knowledge is vocabulary, which is the basis of all training, and listening is no exception. Every dialogue and discourse in listening comprehension is composed of sentences, and the basic unit of sentences is words or phrases. In the process of listening, we can imitate the pronunciation we hear, but if we don't master a certain word, we can't associate it with the word it represents, and we can't know its meaning. Therefore, the author thinks that the size of vocabulary determines the degree of listening comprehension.

Second, the interference of mother tongue.

After hearing a piece of phonetic information, many students are often disturbed by their mother tongue, and are used to translating it word by word in their minds, but they can't directly translate the phonetic information into a certain situation, and they can't think directly in English, thus adding an intermediate link, which affects the reaction speed and memory effect. Understanding sentences in Chinese is not only slow, but also easy to make mistakes. Don't understand, destroyed the direct response. Moreover, when listening, we concentrate on psychological translation and have no time to understand its content, let alone capture its meaning. It is difficult to translate some long sentences that are not used to Chinese.

Third, improper listening methods.

Many students mistakenly believe that they can only understand every word in listening training, so they try to understand every word in the process of listening, which most middle school students can't do. When students pay attention to one thing and ignore another, the listening materials have been played forward, and the listeners are still stuck in what they have heard before, so they can't understand the materials, let alone improve their listening.

Fourth, lack of cultural background knowledge.

Language is the carrier of culture. Language learners must have certain historical and literary knowledge of the culture of the language they are learning. To learn English, they should know more about the living habits, lifestyles, cultural backgrounds and customs of people in some British and American countries. Because some students don't know much about this knowledge, it brings some obstacles to listening.

V. Bad emotional state

In teaching, the author finds that the listener's emotional state is related to listening comprehension. A research group composed of teachers from English Department of Beijing Foreign Studies University once conducted a survey on the quality of undergraduates in China. The results show that emotional state, language ability and learning motivation have the greatest influence on language comprehensive level. It can be seen that the emotional state of the listener is a subjective factor affecting listening. Specifically, without good listening motivation and self-confidence, the listener's attention is easily distracted, thus interfering with the listening process. From the above analysis, we can see that listening ability is not only related to students' language knowledge, but also related to students' psychological quality, listening skills and cultural quality. In view of the problems existing in students' listening, I have taken the following countermeasures: First, break through the hearing barrier and master the basic listening skills.

Students' listening obstacles in listening training mainly include phonetic obstacles, semantic obstacles, psychological obstacles and cultural perception obstacles. In the training process, I first let students pass the phonological knowledge barrier. In the training process, I also ask them to understand the internal meaning of the article according to their existing language knowledge and cultural background knowledge, so as to break through semantic barriers and enhance semantic ability. At the same time, the selected materials should reflect the law of gradual progress, that is, the gradual process from words to sentences to articles. Students should have confidence and patience in listening training, and don't panic when encountering difficulties, so as to break through psychological barriers and improve their psychological endurance. Students' cultural awareness refers to the knowledge they have learned in various subjects, as well as the knowledge of social science and natural science they have learned after class. Only by breaking through the barriers of cultural awareness can we deepen our understanding of what we have heard.

Second, guide listening methods and cultivate listening prediction skills.

Listening skills and methods directly affect the improvement of listening level. Listening comprehension does not mean that you must understand every word and sentence, but understand the meaning expressed by the other party. Therefore, teachers should guide students to learn to discard redundant information when listening to the recording, be good at capturing the information involved in related problems and reduce the blindness of listening. It is also necessary to guide students to browse the listening materials in the interval after getting the test paper, predict the questions to be answered, and listen with a clear aim. In addition, teachers should guide students to make predictions according to topic sentences and keywords. Topic sentences usually appear in the first sentence of the first paragraph, and students can predict the content of the whole paragraph according to it.

Third, expand the investment in listening and improve the listening level in an all-round way.

In English learning, listening, speaking, reading and writing complement each other, and the mastery and improvement of various language skills influence and support each other, especially the improvement of reading ability can promote the improvement of other abilities, including listening. Therefore, from the beginning, teachers should pay attention to cultivating students' reading ability and let them input a lot of language knowledge. In teaching, teachers should pay attention to continuous discourse teaching and the authenticity, understandability, genre universality and communication of the materials they read.

Fourth, stimulate the interest in listening and enhance the motivation of listening.

Interest is the driving force of learning. Students interested in listening are active and happy in class, and the listening effect is bound to be good. Teachers should create a relaxed and harmonious atmosphere in the classroom, strive to eliminate psychological barriers such as fear, depression and disgust, and lose no time to introduce students to the background knowledge related to listening materials, history, geography, culture, customs and anecdotes in Britain and America, which can not only stimulate students' listening interest, but also help them understand what they have learned correctly. In addition, flexible listening forms should be adopted, and competition mechanism should be introduced into listening teaching to stimulate students' listening interest and arouse their listening enthusiasm. For example, in listening training, we can take the way of rushing to answer, see who responds quickly and answers accurately, and reward them in time to stimulate students' sense of competition, so as to improve their listening level faster.

In a word, the improvement of listening comprehension is a long and complicated practical process, which cannot be achieved overnight. Only by taking corresponding countermeasures against the problems existing in students' listening comprehension and persisting for a long time can they be improved.