Chapter 5 Conclusion
5.2 Limitations and Suggestions for Future Study
Although the present study has shown findings with a positive effect on students’
listening comprehension with the assistance of NESTs, especially for those with more
than three years of instruction of NESTs, there are limitations that should be considered.
First of all, we cannot ignore other potential factors that might also affect students’
listening comprehension achievement, such as test-taker variables (Farhady, 1982)
including their experience with test types, their weak and strong areas in language skills,
different resources and exposure of English in urban and rural areas (Chang, 2007).
However, since the goal of the present study is to gain a general understanding of the
students’ listening ability under the guidance of NESTs in a co-teaching module, the
large sample size of this study and the statistical analysis of the data might be sufficient
61
to provide a general pattern of students’ listening performance regardless of other
possible influential factors. Second, the main focus of the present study is analyzed
quantitatively. Although statistical data could provide a general picture of how NESTs
help improve students’ listening ability in English, qualitative data, such as interviews,
classroom observations, questionnaires, might give us a more holistic view of the
impact of the NESTs.
Considering the limitations of the present study, suggestions for future research
are addressed as follows. First of all, the listening test could be shortened in order to
rule out the potential attention span issue. For example, the instruction of the tests could
be either in just Chinese or English. Even though the actual testing parts took up around
20 minutes, the participants were still under the pressure of “taking a test” when
listening to the instruction. In order to exclude the potential attention span issue, it is
suggested that we should take as many test-taker variables as possible into
consideration when administering a test. Secondly, qualitative data should be collected
in each of the areas through interviews and classroom observations to explore how
specifically NESTs influence students in terms of improving their English listening
ability. Last but not least, observations on NESTs themselves could be explored
including their gender, characteristics, and their beliefs of education so that more can
62
be understood in terms of the type of NESTs that contribute most to English learning
in Taiwan. In other words, ETAs could be the subject of future study.
63
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