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Chapter Three Methodology
The purpose of the study is to offer a picture of students’ listening strategy learning process and their listening strategies utilization and development after listening strategy instruction (LSI). In this chapter, participants, instrument, and the treatment are introduced. Besides, the procedure of how to implement the instruction is
illustrated. Finally, how the data was analyzed is presented in the last section.
Participants
One seventh-grade class consisting of 36 EFL students from a public junior high school in northern Taipei participated in this study. These students had learned English in regular education for six years. They were chosen because of the
practicality and the result of the pre-test. Besides, according to the pre-test, this class had the most low proficiency students, up to 50%, among the five classes. Therefore, this class was chosen to participate in this study.
Instruments
Four instruments were used for different purposes in the experiment including the listening section of GEPT elementary level, teaching materials, one reflective journal, and one strategy classification scheme. The following introduces these four
instruments.
The Listening Section of GEPT Elementary Level
GEPT stands for the General English Proficiency Test. This is a standardized test developed and administered by the Language Training & Testing Center (LTTC) commissioned by the Minister of Education of R.O.C. This test covers the four language skills of listening, reading, writing, and speaking and consists of five levels,
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Elementary, Intermediate, High- Intermediate, Advanced, and Superior. In this study, the listening section of the GEPT elementary level was used to rank the students’
ability into three levels, high, middle, and low.
Teaching Materials
The materials used for teaching and reviewing the strategies come from one commercial book, Tactics for Listening (2nd edition) Book 1 by Richards (2003), and two free websites, Randall’s ESL Cyber Listening Lab http://esl-lab.com/ , ELLO http://www.elllo.org/english/home.htm. The past listening sectional exams in
participants’ school are also included.
Tactics for Listening contains three levels ,and Book1, the first level, was used because it is for elementary proficiency level English learners, and the participants in this study belong to elementary level. It featured both top-down and bottom-up processing exercises involving the practice of listening for main idea, selective
attention, listening for details, and several inference-related skills such as listening for attitude, listening for opinions and so on. Besides, it provides simple conversational language and a verity of themes which match well to the themes in the participants’
English text book.
Randall’s ESL Cyber Listening Lab helps English learners to practice listening skill by providing self-grading quizzes and study materials which are divided into three levels from easy to difficult. Besides, topics in this website are various and authentic and scripts are also provided. Learners can choose their favorite topic according to their language proficiency and check their listening comprehension by themselves.
ELLO is a website for English learners to enhance their English four skills. Its materials are sorted by 7 levels including beginner 1-3, intermediate 4-6, and advanced 7, and topics there are of varieties. Several quizzes about vocabulary, reading comprehension, listening comprehension, and speaking are also provided.
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Besides, materials there are provided by English users from different countries;
therefore, various English accents can be contacted.
Past listening sectional exams in the participants’ school includes three parts. The first part usually requires students to choose the correct picture according to what they heard; the second part usually contains a short conversation and a question related to the conversation. The last part usually requires students to choose the right answer after they listened to a short passage. The three parts of the past listening sectional exams were used according to the researcher’s teaching purpose.
Reflective Journal
The reflective journal (see appendix A) includes two parts: one consists of a performance check list and the other consists of two open-ended questions. This reflective journal aims to know students’ strategy utilization and is used to analyze students’ utilization.
The first part of the reflective journal is based on Chen (2009) and it is a check list.
In this part, 30 questions are included and each question is corresponding to different listening strategies which students might use while they were listening. The questions are arranged according to listening process and are concrete sentences starting with
―I‖ so that students can understand the questions more and check their utilization of the strategies naturally.
In order to collect more data of students’ listening strategies use, two open-ended questions were added. One involved students’ evaluation of their strategy use and the other involved students’ self-evaluation of their listening improvement.
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Strategy Classification Scheme
The strategy classification scheme is adapted from Vandergrift (1997) and Chen (2009). This scheme (see Appendix B) includes three domains of listening
strategies—cognitive strategies, metacognitive strategies, and social and affective strategies. Each domain contains different strategies and descriptions of the strategies.
In the description of inference in Chen (2009), two definitions are deleted in strategy classification scheme used in this study. They are ―Draw on knowledge of the world and ―Apply knowledge about the target language.‖ The reasons for deleting the two definitions are as follows. For one thing, the two definitions are overlapped with the definitions in elaboration. For another, according to Vandergrift (1997), inference means using the knowledge within the text while elaboration means using prior knowledge from outside the text; therefore, the two definitions do not belong inference according to Vandergrift.
Treatment
Thirteen listening strategies (see Appendix C) were taught to see how junior high school students adjust their listening strategies after the strategy instruction.
Listening Strategies List
The thirteen listening strategies belong to three domains including metacognitive strategies, cognitive strategies, and social and affective strategies. The following are the introduction of the strategies used in this study.
Metacognitive strategies include planning and evaluation. The purpose of
planning is to prepare oneself before a listening task either mentally or physically. The sub-strategies of planning include using an advance organizer, directed attention, and selected attention. In advance organizer, the researcher taught the students to read over what they had to do and try to think of questions the researcher is going to ask.
In directing attention, the researcher taught students to concentrate themselves as
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much as possible and to maintain attention even when they had trouble understanding some parts of the listening task. In selective attention, the researcher taught students to pay attention to specific aspects of language input that helped them understand the task before listening. In evaluation, the students were asked to write one reflective journal every two weeks. Monitoring as a metacognitive strategy was not explicitly taught in LSI because it was too difficult to teach monitoring due to the ephemeral nature of listening. However, the researcher encouraged students to always check their understanding while they were listening.
The cognitive strategies taught in this study involve listening for the gist, listening for details with note-taking, prediction, imagery, inference, and read the script after listening. According to Nunan (2003) and Vandergrift ( 2004), successful listening happens when students are taught both bottom-up and top-down listening strategies.
Therefore, both bottom-up and top-down strategies were included in this study.
In listening for the gist, the researcher taught students to listen for the main idea and then the details. As for listening for details with note-taking, the researcher taught students to pay attention to 6W (who, what, when, where, why, how), and discourse markers such as ―however‖, ―but.‖ In order to help learners remember the details, simple ways of note-taking was taught at the same time. In prediction, students were taught to predict the content they were going to listen according to some clues on the paper. In imagery, students were taught to mentally image what they heard especially in asking for the direction or prepositions of places. In inference, students were taught to make a guess according to the clues within the context while they were listening.
Finally, students were asked to read the script of the listening message and check the unknown vocabulary after each class.
The reason for choosing such skills as listening for gist, listening for details with note-taking, prediction, inference, and imagery to teach the students was according to
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previous studies (Chan, 2009; Huang, 2008; You, 2007). In these studies, these five cognitive strategies were chosen to teach the students although the names of these strategies in the previous studies may be different from what the researcher used in this study. In other words, these five strategies are more often used in the LSI. With regard to the last strategy—read the script and check the vocabulary, though it seldom appears in LSI, according to Vandergrift (2008), offering students scripts after
listening helps them developing auditory discrimination skills and more refined word recognition skills. Therefore, this strategy was included in this study.
Social and affective strategies consist of cooperation, questioning for
clarification, and confidence building. The three strategies were taught implicitly: that is, the researcher had students work in groups and encouraged them to discuss
problems with classmates during the instruction.
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Procedure
The project includes a pilot study and a main study. Figure 3.4-1 shows the procedure of this study.
Figure 3.1
Pilot Study
Pre-test
Listening Strategy Instruction
Week 1 Metacognitive Strategies Week 7 Review Prediction Week 2 Listening for the gist Week 8 Imagery
Week 3 Review
Listening for the gist
Week 9 Review
Imagery Week 4 Listening for details with
note-taking
Week10 Listening for Inference
Week 5 Review
Listening for details with note-taking
Week11 Review
Listening for inference
Week 6 Prediction Week 12 Review for the whole
strategies
Analyze Reflective Journals in week 3, 7, 12
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Pilot Study
Prior to the main study, a pilot study was conducted to ensure that teaching
materials, the teaching plan, and the reflective journal were appropriate and feasible.
The pilot study was conducted for two weeks and the participants of the pilot study were the other 7th grade students that the researcher taught. We found that the description of the two open questions were too vague for the students to understand.
Therefore, the description of the two open questions was revised. Besides, students had problem in understanding some statements in the check list; therefore, a explanation in advance was needed.
Main Study
Before the study, the participants took listening section of the General English Proficiency Test Elementary Level. Those whose scores were over 80 were grouped into the high proficiency group (HP); those whose scores were between 60-79 were considered as middle proficiency group (MP), and those who scored under 59 or below were in the low proficiency group (LP).
Metacognitive strategies can be applied in every listening task; therefore, it was embedded in every session. That is, students were trained to familiarize with pre-listening planning and post-listening evaluation once they were taught the
metacognitive strategies from the first teaching session. Different cognitive strategies were the main teaching objectives in each strategy teaching session.
Social and affective strategies were taught implicitly in each session. The researcher encouraged students to ask classmates or had students work in pairs to discuss their listening difficulties. Students were also welcomed to ask the researcher questions during the class.
Furthermore, each strategy-teaching session was followed by a strategy-review session in order to help students review and deepen the strategies they learned.
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Besides, reflective journals were given in every strategy-review session to help students reflect on what they had learned.
The strategy instruction procedure was adapted from Chamot (2005) and Chen (2009) , and it was summarized as follows. First, the strategic-awareness raising phase:
the teacher identified students’ present listening strategies through activities. Second, the demonstration phase: the teacher modeled the new strategy and made the
instruction explicit. Third, practice phase: the students practiced the new strategies with similar task and worked as teams to discuss strategy use and listening difficulties.
Fourth, evaluation phase: students self-evaluated the effectiveness of the focused strategies.
Last, expansion phase: students transferred strategies to new task, combined strategies into clusters, and developed repertoire of preferred strategies.
The first to the third phase were included in every teaching session but the last two phases only happened in the review session and the last session. For one thing, students did not have enough time to practice a new repertoire of task and make reflection in every strategy teaching session. For another, in the review session and the last session, the researcher provided a mix-typed listening task for students in order to understand whether or not students could use the strategies flexibly in a new task.
Data Analysis
To answer the research questions, reflective journals in week 3, 7,12 –RJ1, RJ2, and RJ3—were analyzed. There were two ways of analysis in this study. One was quantitative analysis and the other was qualitative analysis. For the quantitative analysis, the reflective journals were coded by the researcher and the other English teacher. The coding scheme is adapted from Vandergrift (1997) and Chen (2009) and was shown in Appendix C. Before the coding, the researcher and the other English
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teacher coded several copies and had discussion over the different coding first. After an agreement was reached, coding of all the reflective journals was conducted. The quantitative data were analyzed by SPSS version 11.5 for the descriptive statistics, and the inter-rater reliability was 1. Besides, to get a picture of students’ reported strategy utilization and development, not only the most and the least reported use of strategies were counted but also the comparison between RJ1 and RJ3 was counted.
For qualitative analysis, the entries in the journals were all transcribed verbatim and categorized into several themes in order to find the development of students’ reported strategy use under the instruction.
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