5.1 Effects of Enhanced Background Knowledge Pre-Instruction Support and Enhanced Vocabulary Pre-Teaching Support (RQ1~RQ3)
5.2.2 Interaction between Pre-Listening Support and Proficiency Level
Although no significant interaction is found between types of pre-listening support and students’ proficiency level, significant difference does exist in the main effects of pre-listening supports (F=3.58, df=2, p<.05, eta squared=.12). This reveals that the effects of both enhanced background knowledge and vocabulary pre-teaching is not dependent on the level of students’ proficiency; in other words, the single factor of enhanced pre-listening supports is strong enough to contribute to effective listening comprehension.
Such results are very promising for pedagogical concerns, because it means that teachers do not need to worry that weaker language learners might not be able to respond well when they intend to incorporate pre-listening supports in their teaching.
Particularly, in a regular EFL class in Taiwan, it is usually more than common to have a mixed-ability student composition. Therefore, if certain listening support matches better with certain proficiency-level learners, it is likely to induce impracticality issue on class instruction. Thus, knowing that both types of the target pre-listening teaching are suitable for students of any proficiency level is by all means a good news for English teachers in Taiwan.
Moreover, participants’ questionnaire responses in the present study also demonstrate favoritism toward the enhanced pre-listening supports on the part of learners. The majority of participants in the background class mention that they like the support and believe that such teaching helps them listen better. Most students’
comments are that because they can form a rough idea of the context and content of the listening passages and engage in guessing the details related to the listening, they are less nervous, have a more focused listening, and have greater success for finding answers to listening questions. Such comments confirm the theory of content/formal schemata (Rumelhart, 1983) and advance organizer (Ausubel, 1961). In other words, if learners’ pre-existing knowledge and experience can be retrieved to predict and interpret the discourse (Brown & Yule, 1983), it can aid learners’ comprehension by
“limiting the number of possible interpretations” (Shrum & Glisan, 1994, p. 114).
From another perspective, because learners have more higher-level (top-down) resources to resort to, they do not have to depend solely on their language ability, so their limited language knowledge can be compensated, especially for weaker learners.
As far as the enhanced vocabulary pre-teaching is concerned, participants also show positive attitudes toward this type of listening support. An even greater majority of students (compared to the treatment of background knowledge) maintain that they not only like the learning of key vocabulary, but they also think of it as facilitative to their listening comprehension. Quite homogeneously, most students believe that knowing the meanings of words beforehand help them understand better utterances in the listening discourse that were otherwise not understood. Some students also mention that the enhanced vocabulary teaching helps them have deeper impression of the target words and they are more likely to memorize them in a short time. These comments support the bottom-up theory, stressing the role of lower-level language interpretation in the whole listening comprehension. They also reflect the fact that
EFL students in Taiwan generally believe that the knowing of vocabulary has much to do with comprehending a whole text. Therefore, as suggested by Tsai (2002), Taiwanese students are emotionally more reliant on vocabulary learning and they would prefer to have word instruction before doing listening tasks.
The findings, inclusive of quantitative data and students’ affective responses from the current study, converge on one significant conclusion: background knowledge pre-instruction and vocabulary pre-teaching are both highly effective on listening comprehension and they can be used interchangeably. Two issues following such conclusion deserve our discussion. First, even though it is found that the effects of two listening supports cannot be compromised by students’ proficiency, some other possible considerations about which support to choose from are important for teachers in EFL classroom contexts. Take the task difficulty for example. If teachers find that a specific listening passage is likely to impose heavy background knowledge strain on students (content difficulty), they can naturally choose background instruction to fill up the gap. On the other hand, if a listening passage exhibits complex language patterns and/or comprises too many difficult words (form difficulty), teachers can go for the word pre-teaching. Also, the task type can be another consideration. For instance, it is advisable for teachers to choose background instruction in expository/argumentative passages, concerning that more professional or transactional knowledge is usually involved in such genre. By contrast, if the listening passage is description-oriented, teachers can apt for vocabulary teaching. Still another possible consideration is students’ learning styles. For instance, if teachers find their class more field independent, they can treat them with higher-level background knowledge so as to compensate for the insufficient big-picture interpretation. But if the class is more field dependent, teachers can supplement it with lower-level vocabulary teaching. On balance, teachers are suggested to base their judgment not on any single
factor, but on the holistic evaluation.
The second issue is the question of possible sequencing effects if two types of supports are to be used in one listening task. In most cases in Taiwan, listening tasks function as supplementary materials or part of an integrated curriculum, so usually teachers have only enough time to apply one type of support. However, in classes where the focus is on listening or where difficult passages are used as prompts, teachers may like to employ both supports to strive for the best effects. In such situation, the question occurs as to which support should be used prior to the other.
Teachers can choose to use background teaching before vocabulary instruction, arguing that big picture should be given before going into details. However, teachers can also choose to teach vocabulary before background, judging that solid language foundation should be laid first. The teaching order is very likely to induce different learning effects. For example, the retention of vocabulary may be negatively impacted by the priority of word instruction; that is, if vocabulary is taught first, how well could students remember what they have learned after they are instructed on background knowledge? Therefore, further research is called upon to address such issue.
On top of the above-mentioned, the tendency regarding the interaction between support types and proficiency also provides some implications. But it should be noted that the interaction did NOT reach significance, so the discussion here is mainly for teachers’ reference. The tendency is found in the present study that high-proficiency students react to background instruction better while low-proficiency learners respond well to either type of support. Possible reasons to explain this phenomenon is that high-proficient learners, on the whole, already have larger vocabulary than low-proficient ones. Or the former may have developed compensation strategies, such as guessing intelligently by using linguistic or other clues (Oxford, 1990), to strive for the meaning of the whole passage. Therefore, stronger learners have less immediate
need for vocabulary pre-learning. On the other hand, weaker students usually tend to lack both linguistic and content knowledge. So either type of listening supports can be beneficial to their comprehension.
Current findings are in consistence with some past studies. Regarding the effectiveness of background knowledge instruction, Chiang & Dunkel’s (1992) showed that when students listen to familiar topics, both high- and low- proficiency level students benefit much from their prior knowledge. Similarly, in the present study, participants show better comprehension of the whole passage after receiving instruction that builds up their background knowledge. Chang & Read (2006) also yielded similar results. They demonstrated that “topic preparation (TP)” is the most facilitative among four types of pre-listening supports across proficiency levels. As Hansen & Jensen (1994) suggested, weaker learners usually put so much focus on decoding every single word that they fail to interpret the text as a whole, i.e.
bottom-up dependency (Field, 2004). Therefore, when lower proficient learners are guided to activate and utilize their higher-level resources as in the current study, they are freed from the constraint of language and are more able to listen better.
In terms of the effectiveness of vocabulary pre-teaching, the findings in this study mirrors that in Tsai’s study (2002). The researcher incorporated pictures and oral example sentences into the vocabulary teaching and the results showed that target word method did not help much for high proficient learners than lower proficient ones.
One possible reason to account for this phenomenon is that stronger learners usually have had larger word repertoire than weaker ones. Thus, it is not unnatural to find that weaker students have greater room for improvement after the instruction. In addition, as mentioned above, less proficient learners are psychologically more dependent on decoding lower-level units of language. Therefore, by receiving instruction on vocabulary, weaker students would have greater confidence and motivation to
continue the listening tasks. Another reason why word pre-teaching benefits lower-proficiency learners more may be due to the incorporation of key-word sentence practice. As Prince (1996) suggested, less proficient learners are not able to transfer the word knowledge to other new contexts. The present study designed simple and clear contextual sentences to help learners extend their newly-learned vocabulary. Therefore, weaker learners can develop stronger word knowledge and retrieval routes of word meaning (Wiseman & Tulving, 1976). On the other hand, in Chang & Read’s study (2006), they indicated that vocabulary teaching is not helpful for either high-proficient or low-proficient learners. This might due to the fact that the word instruction employed in their study is rather limited; that is, students are provided with word-pair and pronunciation practices only. Therefore, if the method of word teaching can be enhanced in their study, chances are better effects of listening comprehension can be expected.
Lastly, the current study also found that the mean score difference between two proficiency levels narrows in experimental classes. This reveals that the application of pre-listening supports helps to bridge the gap of student variation in listening performance. In Taiwan, it is not rare to find mixed-ability classes in which teachers are usually challenged with giving the instruction that suits both higher and lower proficiency learners. But due to some reality reasons, such as limited class hours with heavy teaching load, it seems that weaker learners are usually the group that is left out, or less attended to. So the gap gradually widens, and teachers have no choice but to focus on the intermediate and high proficient learners and the vicious circle continues.
Therefore, the fact that the pre-listening teaching is proved to facilitate students’
comprehension, especially weaker students, is by all means a promisingly worthwhile investment for EFL teachers in Taiwan. By doing these activities, teachers can not only achieve their goal of helping students listen better, but they can also narrow the
distance between more effective and less effective students. All in all, both types of the pre-listening supports in the present study are able to help not just high proficient learners but also lower proficient counterparts to achieve greater extent of comprehension.