The majority of previous studies acclaimed the beneficial effects of pre-providing ESL/EFL learners with background knowledge to help their listening comprehension. They demonstrated that this type of advance organizer aids learners to comprehend and retain information better. For example, Markham & Latham (1987) investigated the influence of religion-specific background on adult ESL learners’
listening comprehension. Sixty five advanced university students participated in the study, 16 of them reported practicing Moslems, 20 of them, Christians, and the remaining 28 reported to be religiously neutral. The experiment was conducted in a regular class period, where all participants listened to two passages of equal syntactic complexity discussing the prayer rituals in Islam and Christianity respectively.
Students then engaged in recall protocol. Results showed that Christian participants
recalled more main-idea units and performed fewer distortions on the Christian ritual passage whereas the Moslem participants outperformed their counterparts in Islam passage. In retrospective interview, as one of the participants mentioned, having the knowledge about her own religious belief enabled her to know what might be contained in the following listening passage and to testify hypotheses wherein.
Long (1990) followed this line of research. His participants were surveyed to have more background knowledge in “U2” than in “Gold rush” topics. They listened to two passages on different topics and were required to do the checklist test (recognition) first and summary task (recall) later. Results showed that participants generally did better on “U2” listening passage in both types of comprehension tests.
However, among 188 participants, 13 of them were found to be overextending their schemata; that is, they overly applied certain prior knowledge to explain the whole aural messages without considering the meanings of language itself. Therefore, this additional message suggested that schemata can also have a dysfunctional impact if not applied appropriately.
Schmidt-Rinehart (1994) in her study on the effects of topic familiarity on ESL listening comprehension also yielded positive results. She demonstrated that participants, regardless of their proficiency level, have better scores in recall measures when listening to familiar topic (here refers to the topic that had appeared in participant’s textbook) than to novel one. Bacon (1992) in her descriptive study on EFL learners’ phases of listening also provides supports to the role of background knowledge. Addressing Anderson’s phases of listening comprehension process (1983), she found that learners had little reference to prior knowledge in “perceptual stage”
(the stage in which learners pay core attention to the sounds of language and store the aural input in echoic memory), but some learners took advantage of their previous knowledge or experience in “utilization stage” (the stage in which learners link the
aural input to the existing knowledge). Bacon also showed that more successful learners were able to use their background knowledge more effectively by
“elaborating or connecting with their personal world and discourse knowledge” (1992, p. 329). But on the part of less successful learners, they either relied too much on prior knowledge only or neglected it altogether.
Another study that endorses the advantageous effects of background knowledge on L2 listening comprehension is Chiang & Dunkel’s research (1992). This study explored the interrelationship among speech modification, prior knowledge, listening proficiency, and test type. Three hundred and eighty-eight EFL Chinese students were involved, who were grouped into high-intermediate listening proficiency (HILP) and low-intermediate listening proficiency (LILP) and then were randomly assigned to four experimental groups. Each group received one of the following types of lecture based on random selection: (1) familiar-unmodified (2) familiar-modified (3) unfamiliar-unmodified (4) unfamiliar-modified. Results showed that both levels of students had significantly benefited from their prior knowledge on familiar topic (here refers to “Confucius and Confucianism”) when engaging in passage-independent multiple-choice test items; however, no such significance was found in passage-dependent comprehension tests. The results generally acknowledged the helpfulness of background knowledge, yet reservation was made because test type might be a possible factor to mediate the effectiveness of prior knowledge on listening comprehension.
The aforementioned studies all tended to corroborate the prowess of background knowledge/schemata on the facilitation of listening comprehension; but these studies as well as some other related studies in fact did not practically incorporate into listening program the teaching of background knowledge as a pre-listening support. Such study design might not be convincing enough if our
primary goal is for pedagogical consideration. Thus, in the following space, three empirical studies which indeed taught background knowledge were reviewed for further discussion.
Chang & Read (2006) examined the effects of four types of listening supports on aiding EFL students’ listening comprehension; they are previewing questions (PQ), repeated input (RI), topic preparation (TP), and vocabulary instruction (VI). One hundred and sixty Taiwanese college students participated in the study. They were divided into four classes according to regular administrative procedures and each class’ entry proficiency level was justified to be statistically equivalent. In addition, in order to further investigate the interaction between student’s proficiency level and the type of listening supports, students in each class were grouped into high proficient learners (HP) and low proficient learners (LP) based on their TOEIC listening scores.
For the focus here, the TP group spent 25 minutes or so reading related L1 background materials and joined in teacher-led discussion afterwards. Results indicated that providing background knowledge is the most effective support across proficiency levels. However, with further examination, HP group performed slightly better when simply being offered another chance to listen to the input again (that is, the Repeated Input treatment.)
Another study that involved integration of the instruction of background knowledge is the one done by Chung (1999). In her study, she compared the effects of three pre-listening treatments, “advance organizer”, “caption”, and “combination of both”, on facilitating learners’ understanding of foreign videos. For the “advance organizer group”, the instructor read aloud six to eight Chinese sentences, summarizing the main plot of the listening input and students were allowed to take notes freely. Results, however, showed that providing background knowledge did not work as well as expected (only better than the control group). The researcher
explained it might be due to the fact that students did not particularly need this type of support or it could be because the support was presented in oral form, instead of written form, suggesting that students were less able to attend to oral information.
Herron (1994) also attempted to gauge the value of prior knowledge on listening comprehension with the implementation of instruction in class. The researcher aimed to see how effective background knowledge is on video viewing by comparing the video＋advance organizer with video only group. For the experiment group, she read aloud to participants six L2 French sentences written on the blackboard that summarize the main scenes in chronological order. The whole presentation took less than one and a half minute; yet the results showed significant growth on listening comprehension performance, demonstrating the beneficial effects of background knowledge.
In a nutshell, it seems that there’s a great tendency in the literature to extol the role of background knowledge on its promotion of better listening comprehension.
However, despite the fact that the majority of studies supported the positive effects prior knowledge exerts on comprehension, there were still several studies that held reservation (e.g., Long, 1990; Chiang & Dunkel, 1992; Chung, 1999, as reviewed).
Therefore, we cannot help but wonder if the presentation of background knowledge can be enhanced, would the results reach better consistence? Some studies in the following section shed light for this concern.