Listening Comprehension

2.1.1. Listening Comprehension Process

Listening comprehension has been under great interest and been investigated from

many aspects for decades among educational researchers. Most researchers in recent

years focus on the cognitive aspect of listening comprehension, which mainly examines

the process of the comprehension (e.g., Kurita, 2012; O’Malley & Küpper, 1989; Rost,

1990; Rubin, 1994; Vandergrift, 1999, 2007). There are two commonly adopted models

of listening comprehension: Anderson’s (1985) three stages of language comprehension

and top-down processing versus bottom-up processing. Anderson (1985) proposed that

8

comprehension is an interrelated and recursive process which involves perceptual

processing, parsing, and utilization. In the first stage, perceptual processing, attention

is focused on the encoding of the spoken message. In the second stage, parsing, words

and messages are utilized to build up meaningful mental representations. The third stage

is utilization, in which the listener relates the mental representation to the existing

knowledge and it is the stage where comprehension takes place if the mental

representation and the existing knowledge are matched.

Based on the aforementioned listening comprehension model, O’Malley and

Küpper (1989) conducted an empirical study to examine whether L2 learners process

information as proposed by Anderson and the strategies used while comprehending

academic texts with a group of high school students in an ESL context using “think

aloud” protocol. The participants were asked to listen to different types of listening

passages including lectures and short stories and think aloud in either Spanish or

English to explain how they understood the listening passages. The result showed that

the listening comprehension presented by the participants was consistent with the three

stages proposed by Anderson. Furthermore, the strategies used by effective and

ineffective listeners were different and were applied in various ways depending on the

phase of comprehension.

9

Another model of listening comprehension deals with the idea of top-down

processing and bottom-up processing. Top-down processing refers to the application of

background knowledge in understanding the meaning of a message, while in the

bottom-up processing, the understanding of each of the linguistic characteristics from

the incoming input is used as the basis for understanding the whole message. It is

generally agreed by many researchers that listening comprehension occurs when both

top-down and bottom-up processes continuously interact (Vandergrift, 2007). For

example, Chien and Wei (1998) investigated the strategies used by different proficiency

levels of college EFL learners in listening comprehension with two sets of authentic

listening materials in recall tasks. The result showed that to match the new information

with what is already known (top-down processing) and to infer meaning between words

or phrases (bottom-up processing) are two most effective cognitive strategies for

understanding the aural input. Chang and Read (2006) also evaluated the influence of

listening strategies on the listening performance of college EFL learners. The listening

comprehension test they applied was a section of TOEIC listening comprehension test

which was recorded by native-speaking ESL teachers with diverse accents. They found

that the most effective type of support was providing information about the topic, which

is more of a top-down processing; vocabulary instruction was the least useful form of

support, which is more of a bottom-up processing.

10

Despite the fact that all the empirical studies mentioned above explored listening

comprehension strategies used by learners with different tests or tasks and put much

emphasis on the process of comprehension, the listening constructs, that is, the

definition of listening competence and the listening tasks, in the aforementioned studies

were neglected. As Chapelle (1999) pointed out that there are two ways to define a

construct: (1) to define the competence, that is, the abilities that we believe the

test-takers should acquire and (2) to define the tasks that we think test-test-takers should perform.

However, either way was applied in the abovementioned studies. When using listening

tests to conduct research, the construct validity should be of primary concern

(Vongpumivitch, 2007). In terms of the listening assessment, further literature review

will be presented in the later section. Apart from the listening constructs, the materials

that learners process during the comprehension in both the empirical studies and the

real-life situations are also of importance considered by many researchers (e.g., Buck,

1995; Field, 2010; Goh, 2002; Rubin, 1994; Vandergrift, 2004) which were also

overlooked in the above-reviewed empirical studies.

2.1.2. Authentic Input for Listening Comprehension

Despite the fact that the major focus of the recent listening comprehension studies

has been laid on the process of the comprehension, there is a body of research on

listening comprehension about how learners interact with authentic input (Rubin, 1994).

11

Some researchers examined the text characteristics such as the text type of the listening

passage (e.g., Shohamy & Inbar, 1991), the acoustic variables (i.e. speech rate) of the

authentic input (e.g., Griffiths, 1991); others from the aspect of interlocutor

characteristics such as the gender of the speaker (e.g., Markham, 1988).

The term “authentic” was defined by Rogers and Medley (1988, p. 468) as

“language samples that reflect a naturalness of form, and an appropriateness of cultural

and situational context that would be found in the language as used by native speakers.”

As Vandergrift (2007, p. 200) pointed out that “exposure to authentic-type texts and

natural speech rate is preferred by L2 learners and can be beneficial for listening

development.” Such statement coincides with Rogers and Medley’s (1988) study that

they believed students should experience the language which is used for real

communication by native speakers. It is necessary to incorporate authentic materials in

the activities developed for language learning. After all, the ultimate goal for language

learning is to facilitate L2 learners to comprehend the target language in real-life

situations (Rogers & Medley, 1988). This might also explain why all the empirical

studies reviewed adopt authentic listening materials when examining listening

comprehension.

However, not all studies present such point of view. For example, Teng (2001)

examined the effects of modified sentences and the speech rate of listening texts on the

12

listening comprehension of a group of 168 EFL freshmen in college. The results showed

that students performed better when they listened to the tests that were syntactically

modified. Besides, students performed better in the slower version of the input instead

of the original version. The researcher concluded that the use of modified listening

passages should be applied in the listening tests. It seems that mixed statements have

been claimed considering the use of authentic or modified listening materials when

examining listening comprehension. Thus, the present study intends to investigate how

the authentic input of NESTs in a co-teaching model influences younger learners’

listening proficiency.