English Listening Learning

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CHAPTER 2 LITERATURE REVIEW

This chapter is composed of four sections. First, an overview of elements

containing listening comprehension is addressed. Theories and studies pertains to listening learning are reviewed as well. Moreover, difficulties and development of listening learning are also discussed. Second, the development of CALL and teachers’

role in Call are surveyed and summarized. Third, the importance of TAM is discussed.

Lastly, the definition of cognitive load and its impacts on learning performance are addressed.

2.1 English Listening Learning

2.1.1 Importance of English Listening Learning

Listening comprehension has long been neglected in research and considered as an ability which can develop without effective assistance (Osada, 2004). Some researchers claimed that listening comprehension was an innate ability that people were born to have, and therefore there was no need to learn it. Some even considered listening is equal to hearing. However, many researchers have challenged this statement and have pointed out that the ability to listen is different from the ability to hear. Lames (2005) further indicated that hearing is an innate ability that people possess; in contrast, listening requires concentration to catch the meaning of the

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context. Taylor (1964) indicated that hearing involves physiological process of sound while listening is a complex process in which listeners accumulate sounds first,

identify “short sound sequences as words, and then translate larger word sequences into meaning”.

Before the importance of listening comprehension are widely noticed, listening comprehension lessons were restricted in a relatively narrow format, such as pre-teaching of new vocabulary, examination of vocabulary, and so forth. Moreover, listening was generally regarded as a tool to enhance reading and speaking abilities only; therefore, its teaching methods and learning techniques had long been neglected.

Brown (1987) claimed that the few numbers of studies associated with listening comprehension exactly showed the inferior status of listening in language teaching and the ignorance of many teachers.

From 1940s, the founders of the listening skill, James Brown, Ralph Nichols, and Carl Weaver, started to pay attention to the recognition of listening (Bozorgian, 2012);

after that, more researchers carried on studies associated with listening practice and training (Feyten, 1991). Listening comprehension skills thereby started to receive more systematic attention (Wu, 2004). Meanwhile, a variety of theories and instructional designs which aimed at assisting teachers and learners to develop effective listening strategies had been proposed since then, and listening has finally

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been viewed as a distinctive skill (Brown, 1990), a fundamental role played in language acquisition, rather than a secondary one.

In addition, listening has played an important role in language acquisition especially in terms of communicative language teaching and has been viewed as the

basis of communicative competence (Tavil, 2010; Renukadevi, 2014). Renukadevi (2014) pointed out that listening “provides the aural input and enables learners to

interact in spoken communication and hence language learning largely depends on listening”. Many researchers have advocated this view and indicated that listening

comprehension is an essential skill for language communication (Brown, 1987; De Ruyter, & Wetzels, 2000; Gilakjani, & Ahmadi, 2011; Bozorgian, 2012). In short, listening is an integrative skill which is consistently interrelated with language skills (Vandergrift, 1999; Renukadevi, 2014; Benson, & Hjelt, 1978). It undoubtedly plays a pivotal role in language acquisition. Hence, it is essential to get to know the importance of listening learning and to find out efficient ways to facilitate it.

2.1.2 Difficulty of English Listening Learning

In recent years, language researchers have not only emphasized the importance of listening but also stressed that of learners’ motivation (Field, 1998). Many

language researchers have explored effective ways to help learners improve their

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listening comprehension as well as proposed solutions to solve learners’ listening problems.

To understand listening problems that Taiwanese students encounter during listening practices, several studies were conducted to investigate them (Chuang, 2009;

Ku, 2012; Lin, 2014; Huang, 2015). Table 2.1 summarizes some empirical studies on

Taiwanese students’ problems during performing English listening training.

Table 2.1 Summary of empirical studies on Taiwanese students’ problems during performing English listening training

Researcher Participants Summary of the Findings

Huang, meaning of unfamiliar words or sentences caused the main obstacle in students’ listening process.

Lin, 2014 ninth graders was the unrepeated listening material. foremost difficulty for the effective listeners was unrepeated materials, and for the ineffective ones was weak grammar.

These previous studies indicated that having no time to process the previous text, distraction of the subsequent part, and unrepeated materials were main problems that learners were faced with while performing English listening training. Listening

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practice has a property and progress of continuity, which may cause learners’ anxiety and frustration when they cannot catch up with others, and the unsatisfied performance therefore leads to lower motivation to learn.

Blau (1990) indicated that the effect of listening with pauses is prior to that of listening with mechanically slower speed. Blau demonstrated that “speed of speech”

should not be the primary concern because slowing down the speech did not increase comprehension for most listeners. Generally speaking, the slower but unnatural speed would interfere with the listening comprehension instead (Flaherty, 1979). The similar viewpoint was also proposed by Aronson (1974). His study observed that the pause provided listeners with more time to think about the listening message after they received it. His study indicated that the pause should be moderate; otherwise, the pause would be a hinder of comprehension.

Another obstacle that listeners faced for listening comprehension was the right of speed control (Underwood, 1989). Apart from the control of speed, listeners could not decide what and when to replay, either. Underwood (1989) indicated that the repeated listening passages and the times for replaying were usually decided by teachers in the classroom. Individual learner had no chance to choose the reviewing sections according to his/her need. The frustration of making decision on their learning may thereby decrease learners’ motivation to practice listening.

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Thus, this study aimed to assess whether the employed VALRM can improve learners’ listening comprehension by giving them more right of decision making.

Moreover, with the assistance of annotation in the VALRM, learners can replay the sections they are not clear with anytime without distracted by having no time to process the text.