The present study is an attempt to understand the subtle relations among English listening difficulty, English listening proficiency, and English listening self-efficacy of junior high school students in Taiwan. The main instruments utilized include a listening self-efficacy scale adopted from Rahimi and Abedini (2009), the listening part of an elementary level General English Proficiency Test, and a listening difficulty questionnaire adapted from several scholars, whose work is discussed in the following chapter.
Participants
The study was held in a municipal junior high school in Taipei City, Taiwan. The school was at the west side of Taipei City and was close to Sanchong District of New Taipei City. Most of the students in this school were from Taipei City, and others mostly came from Sanchong District.
There were twenty-four ordinary classes in this school, with eight classes in each grade. Suffering from the low birth rate in recent years, students of the school had decreased from about thirty-five students in each class to about only twenty-seven students. There was one resource class for English, math and Chinese, and the students in the resource class participated in the special course while other students took the regular class. As the present research is interested in students’ English listening comprehension, students except those in the resource class were recruited in the study.
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It was assumed that students in the resource class might find English too hard and render no effects for meaningful reference.
Though there were eight classes at grade eight, the present study only involved four classes. The concern was surrounded on the evermore emphasized issue of students’
personal information, as students’ test scores are not allowed to be viewed by outsiders.
Since the design of the study implicated the use of students’ English listening test scores in an elementary-level GEPT listening test, scores of those students who were not taught by the researcher were not possible or even ethical to be approached. As a consequence, only classes taught by the researcher, who was an English teacher in the school, were chosen for the study.
The school had eighth graders watch ABC interactive English video program every Wednesday morning for about twenty-seven minutes. The students did so except for weeks of and before school monthly tests. ABC Interactive English was one series of English learning magazines under the publisher LIVE ABC. It was targeted at the beginning level. The students of the study were required to purchase issues of ABC Interactive English every other month. The content of the magazines were taught during the eighth class, which was an after school program held by the school that students join voluntarily. To ensure that students learn from the magazine materials, the content of the magazines was tested on the school monthly tests. The broadcast of the video teaching programs every Wednesday morning was accompanied with mandatory note-taking with spot checks from the office of academic affairs. It was believed that these measures prompt students to watch ABC Interactive English teaching programs attentively.
In addition to the weekly viewing of ABC Interactive English programs in the morning study session, the students got English listening comprehension practices in
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their English courses. The English subject textbook version of the students was Nani Bookstore, and the design of the textbooks involved one page of listening comprehension practices in each lesson. The workbooks accompanying the textbooks also provided one independent English listening comprehension test for every lesson.
The items of these English listening practices were diverse and aimed at helping students relate the reading materials to their audio form. As the subjects of the study were all students of the researcher, who maintained the importance of English listening comprehension, they were all exposed to the above listening materials since the beginning of their English course.
To test whether the English proficiency of the students vary among four classes, the scores of students’ third English monthly test were checked through one-way ANOVA with SPSS Statistics 22.0. The result is as presented in Table 1.
There were approximately thirty to thirty-three students in each class. And their means of the English monthly test scores were from around 61 to 70. The calculation of one-way ANOVA was used to test the significance of the differences between the means of a number of different populations (Ferguson & Takane, 1989; Lin, 1987). It was found that there was no significant difference among the scores of the four classes, as the result of the analysis was F (3,122) = 0.73, p = 0.54. So it is proved that the four classes of students did not differ significantly in their English proficiency, which was an ideal situation for the research.
Table 1. Student Scores of the Third English Monthly Test.
Class A Class B Class C Class D
Number 32 30 33 31
Mean 62.82 64.67 61.06 70.16
S.D. 26.34 25.67 22.58 24.51
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Instruments
For the present study, participants filled in the English listening self-efficacy scale first, then took an English listening comprehension part of elementary level GEPT test, and finally filled out the English listening comprehension difficulty questionnaire. Self-efficacy, by its own definition, is people’s belief about their ability to accomplish a certain task. As a result, the self-efficacy scale was put at the beginning of the study.
An English listening comprehension test of elementary GEPT was used to both assess subjects’ English listening comprehension proficiency and to act as a reminder or reference experience for students. After finishing the listening comprehension test of the elementary GEPT, they could have more ideas in completing the English listening comprehension difficulty questionnaire.