introduced ourselves. One of my classmates was from the same town as I, so I went to further introduce myself. I said, “So you teach at Junior High School X.” Her reply was, “Pardon?” I felt surprised. I immediately slowed down and asked again, “You are a teacher at Junior High School X.” This time she said, “Yes,” which was the answer I expected all along.
It has been noted that even students who have studied English for more than ten years still do not understand the connected speech of natives, as the English teacher did in the illustration above (Wong, Mok, Chung, Leung, Bishop and Chow, 2017 ).
When spoken at the normal rate of a native speaker with all the contractions, elisions and linking sounds, the L2 listener does not seem to process the information as quickly as it is presented.
Part of the purpose of language of any kind is communication. And if the listener does not understand natives speaking in standard form, part of the purpose of learning a foreign language is defeated.
In Taiwan, students from middle and upper class homes begin learning English in the first year of kindergarten (age 4) and some earlier than that. Students from blue collar homes may get English for the first time in the first grade of elementary school, or maybe third grade.
Yet, unless one attends an English-only cram school/kindergarten, understanding English spoken on YouTube or other online channels is highly unlikely. Only if one takes the personal initiative to persevere, does listening to native-speed speech happen.
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So if comprehension does not happen in normal English classes, even after more than 10 years of study, can listening skills be taught so as to help the L2 student understand more at the normal rate of the native speaker, instead of the slower, textbook rate? This issue is becoming more and more relevant in Taiwan as the junior high school students have an English listening section on the senior high school entrance exam (Huei Kao 會考).
With this study, I wanted to see if teaching listening skills to junior high school students has any effect whatsoever or if these skills depend on vocabulary acquisition.
I wanted to teach and test general listening ability and discrimination for contractions and weakened vowels.
In their study, Wong, et al. (2017) tested college students who volunteered for the study, but the researchers did not give specific classroom instruction in listening skills.
In their study, sixty students were tested on general listening comprehension, reduced forms dictation, minimal pairs discrimination, speech gating, phonemic awareness, general vocabulary and phonological memory. These were university level students, and they were given a whole battery of tests over several hours. Their finding was that vocabulary matters in listening for reduced sounds, but it was also considered
necessary to teach both formal and reduced sounds in the classroom. This study did not have a control group. They also did not require the listeners to process the input in real time. There was no grammar section (Wong, et al. 2017). This means a refined duplicate study may be useful to verify their results.
Another study that has inspired the design of this study is Brown and Hilferty (1986). In the study, the researchers looked at 32 students in China. Half of them were taught reduced sounds and half of them were given pronunciation practice with
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minimal pairs. The group that was taught reduced sounds performed better on a listening test than those who did not.
In this study, I divided the six Grade 8 classes that I taught during the fall semester of 2017 into two groups. Three classes had five minutes additional
instruction on listening strategies (i.e. listening for contractions, elisions and linked sounds), in addition to a practice exercise. Three classes were the control group and had minimal pair practice as in the Brown and Hilferty study (1986). For the test, the students had to process and respond to what they heard in real time.
What led the test to be set up in the form in which it is as listed in Appendix C?
In 2013, I tried teaching listening based off some TOEFL preparation web sites. The students were there for a booster type class. They were not the top in their classes.
The material I made was overwhelmingly difficult for the students in that the material was spoken too fast, and the students’ vocabulary processing ability was not able to keep pace with the spoken text. One of the sites suggested “Same or Different” type of practice questions. I experimented with this, and it also was too difficult. Many of the students quit at semester break because they felt it was too difficult.
I also made a set of conversation sound tracks and had the students answer questions at the end of the conversation. These frustrated some of the lower-level learners as the material, though slow, was still too much and too fast. In 2015 I used a syllabus that I prepared making the students “Circle the Word,” “Connect the
Pictures,” and some other such simpler tasks that tested their listening comprehension on a lower, more appropriate level. This was based on Tsai and Sciuto’s textbooks (n.d.). The students seemed to do well and make some progress.
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國立 政 治 大 學
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N a tio na
l C h engchi U ni ve rs it y
These experiences made me believe that if I screened out one sound and had the students listen for that one sound, it might be effective and doable for junior high school students.
Thus the research questions were: (1) Does teaching for reduced sounds in the junior high school have any effect on general listening comprehension? (2) Does teaching listening for reduced sounds in the junior high school have any effect on the student’s capability of understanding reduced sounds?
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國立 政 治 大 學