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兩種強化的聽前教學對台灣地區國中學生聽力理解的影響研究: 背景知識教學與單字教學

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(1)國立台灣師範大學英語研究所 碩士論文 Master Thesis Graduate Institute of English National Taiwan Normal University. 兩種強化的聽前教學對台灣地區國中學生聽力理解的影響研究: 背景知識教學與單字教學. The Effects of Two Enhanced Pre-Listening Supports on Taiwanese Junior High Students’ Listening Comprehension: Background Knowledge Pre- Instruction versus Vocabulary Pre-Teaching. 指導教授:陳齊瑞博士、曾文鐽博士 Advisor: Dr. Qi-Rui Chen、Dr. Wen-Ta Tseng 研究生:康靈 Student: Ling Kang June 2009.

(2) Chapter One Introduction. 1.1 Motivation Listening ability is a fundamental and crucial component of overall language competence (Sun, 2002). It is also an imperative skill to develop for successful communication. Language learners in EFL contexts, however, usually find themselves more labored in understanding spoken than written language (Chung, 2002; Chang & Read, 2006). Compared to ESL learners, EFL learners lack the immediate need to comprehend utterances to communicate with interlocutors outside the classroom (Brown, 2000; 2001). What is more, in most Asian countries such as Taiwan, where national exams have been leading the pedagogical practices in schools, the absence of listening tests causes negative backwash effects—teachers place less emphasis on developing listening skills in class (Yen, 1987; Cheng, 2000) and students are less motivated to find aural input independently in their private learning time. But listening is a complex task that involves phonological, syntactic, semantic, pragmatic, and kinetic knowledge (Buck, 2001; Flowerdew & Miller, 2005); to comprehend the aural input, it requires listeners’ efforts to segment language input, retrieve correct schemata for interpretation, make accurate inferences, and the like (Chung, 2002). Therefore, the demand for increasing in-class instruction and practice on listening is reasonable. Given that EFL learners have less exposure to spoken language and are less familiar in tackling the listening tasks, they should not be asked to immediately plunge into intimidating listening tasks (Chang & Read, 2006), but should instead be “tuned in”, so that “they know what to expect, both in general and for specific tasks.” (Underwood, 1989, p. 30) Literature has established the relationship between this 1.

(3) tuning-in procedure and listening comprehension, indicating that the former has beneficial effects for the enhancement of the latter (Mueller, 1980; Omaggio, 1993; Herron, 1994; Herron et al, 1995; Chung, 1999; Jones & Plass, 2002). Therefore, teachers can provide learners with pre-listening support activities to combat the listening tasks. Such activities are proved to aid students to listen selectively and effectively, to avoid distractions, and to retain information successfully, so to speak, to achieve “active listening.” (Rost, 2002, p. 158) Previous researchers have proposed various types of pre-listening supports that draw on different levels of processing. The top-down processing helps learners compensate for their inadequate language proficiency by activating stored content schemata, formal schemata, and related world/topical knowledge (Bonk, 2000; Field, 2004). On the other hand, the bottom-up processing establishes the foundation for the correct interpretation of incoming aural messages and the retrieval of correct schemata to match those messages (Bonk, 2000; Field, 2004). The former type of supports include giving background knowledge, pre-pronouncing topics, previewing test questions whereas the latter contain pre-teaching vocabulary, grammar, or sentence structures. Although it is generally acknowledged that both top-down and bottom-up processing contribute to good listening comprehension (Witkin, 1990) and that these two levels of listening are able to interact with and influence each other (Buck, 2001, p. 52), there has been a great concern for researchers to decide which level of pre-listening supports is better when learner characteristics, such as language proficiency, are taken into consideration. The consensus, however, is not yet reached and the results of past studies still need further examination before applying them in different learning contexts. Following this line of research, the present study is particularly interested in tapping the effectiveness of “pre-giving background 2.

(4) knowledge” and “pre-teaching vocabulary” in Taiwan’s junior high schools for the following reasons. First, a great number of studies have demonstrated that learners’ background knowledge significantly facilitates listening comprehension (Markham & Latham, 1987; Long, 1990; Chiang & Dunkel, 1992; Schmidt-Rinehart, 1994; Chung, 1999; Chang & Read, 2006). However, most of these studies only judged whether students have background knowledge based on questionnaires or teacher’s subjective evaluation, and simply took it as a fact without designing a method of instruction addressing students’ insufficient background knowledge. In fact, only a few studies actually incorporated the instruction of background knowledge in the experiment and most of them showed favorable results (Chang & Read, 2006; Chung, 1999). Thus we are left with the question whether teachers can fill the gap with instruction when students lack related background knowledge. In brief, we need to find out the effects of pre-teaching background knowledge in listening tasks. Second, regarding the role of vocabulary pre-teaching, previous research is inconclusive. Some acclaimed its values (Chung & Huang, 1998; Bonk, 2000) while others doubted its effects (Chung, 2002; Chang & Read, 2006). More intriguingly, learners were psychologically and affectively reliant on such pre-listening support while at the same time indicating its limited power for aiding their comprehension (Chung, 2002; Chang & Read, 2006). Thus, it is imperative to probe the possible problems of previous research design on the methods of vocabulary teaching for the purpose of determining the effectiveness of this listening support. In other words, there is the need to overcome previous studies’ limitations and modify them with theory-based alternatives on the teaching of vocabulary. Third, previous studies that examined different types of pre-listening supports are mostly of tertiary levels both in foreign countries (Herron et al, 1998; Jones & 3.

(5) Plass, 2002) and local context (Taiwan) (Yen, 1987; Teng, 1994). Junior high school students are often the neglected population, though. However, exploring suitable teaching methods and techniques for this level of students is by no means less imperative. We believe that it’s better to introduce listening support activities at earlier stage of language learning so that students would be able to develop more confidence and positive attitudes toward listening. Since junior high students differ from tertiary students in learning contexts and listener characteristics, such as intelligence, motivation, strategy use (Rubin, 1994), further investigation is needed before the results found in tertiary levels are applied to junior high students. Fourth, both of the two preparatory teaching, background knowledge pre-instruction and key vocabulary pre-teaching, are regarded by many EFL learners as facilitative to their comprehension; so, if the above mentioned limitations could be overcome, they can be the methods that are both helpful in enhancing listening comprehension and applicable in class. Namely, we hope to design the pre-listening supports that are practical and effective for junior high school students. In brief, previous research has not agreed upon the effectiveness of the two pre-listening supports and there are limitations of study design to overcome and the past studies were mostly conducted on tertiary levels. Given these problems, the present study attempts to improve the target supports and investigate their effects on listening comprehension in the context of Taiwan’s junior-high schools.. 1.2 Theoretical Background Ausubel (1960; 1961) first coined the term “advance organizer” to describe the process of integrating new information with already-stored resources in learners’ brains. As he put it, advance organizers are “introductory material at a higher level of abstraction, generality, and inclusiveness than the learning material itself.” (Ausubel, 4.

(6) 1961, p. 252) He hypothesized that if the new-coming materials can be made meaningful and relevant to learners’ cognitive structures, these materials will then be comprehensible and can be retained to long-term memories. A large body of research has been conducted to justify the incorporation of advance organizers into the classroom teaching. Buck (1995) proclaimed that these preparatory activities help learners draw accurate context and background knowledge to attack the forthcoming tasks. Mendelsohn (1995) also indicated that advance organizers assist the activation of existing knowledge of the topic which can “link what they comprehend and to use this as a basis of their hypothesis-formation, prediction, and inferencing” (p. 140). In brief, it is believed that advance organizers play an essential role in orienting learners in task-tackling. Providing background knowledge is one of the most researched advance organizers in the literature. It is regarded as the pre-existing knowledge that pertains to the topic of the current tasks. Background knowledge has been operationalized in several aspects, including cultural knowledge (Johnson, 1970), topic familiarity (Hammadou, 1991), contextual visuals (Omaggio, 1979; Carrell, 1983; Glass, 1992) and the forth. A number of studies have also corroborated its effectiveness in the facilitation of listening comprehension (Long, 1990; Chiang and Dunkel, 1992; Schmidt-Rinehart, 1994; Teng, 1998) and the impact of its absence (Connor, 1984; Carrell, 1984, 1987). Nevertheless, most of these studies simply judged participant’s familiarity toward the topic either by the course syllabus (Schmidt-Rinehart, 1994) or by participants’ self-report (Chiang and Dunkel, 1992; Schmidt-Rinehart, 1994) and demonstrated its respective effects on listening comprehension with and without such prior knowledge. They, however, did not devise practical ways to incorporating the teaching of background knowledge into classroom settings. Besides, although most studies proved the positive effects of background knowledge on listening 5.

(7) comprehension, there is at least one study that addressed the potential problem arising from the interaction between topic familiarity and test types. Ching and Dunkel (1992), for example, came to the conclusion that prior knowledge was significantly positive for the retention of information only for passage-independent post-lecture comprehension test. Therefore, it remains unclear whether background knowledge still has its effects for test questions directly related to the listening task itself. In short, the majority of studies have indicated the positive relationship between learners’ background knowledge and their listening comprehension, yet the main problem is that most of these studies did not incorporate the teaching of background knowledge into classroom instruction and examine its effectiveness afterwards. In other studies that indeed incorporated the teaching of background knowledge into the study design, the results did not seem to be congruent. Chang and Read (2006) equipped their participants with background knowledge by providing them with L1 reading passage related to the listening topic. Results showed that on the whole this type of listening support is most effective. In Chung’s study (1999), on the other hand, did not yield the same satisfying outcomes. The participants in the “advance organizer group” received a treatment in which they were provided with key sentences about the plot of a video clip. But it came to be less effective than “combined group” (key sentences + L2 subtitles) and “caption group”(L2 subtitles), and only better than the control group. The researcher indicated that such ineffectiveness could be attributed to the oral form of advance organizer and that different results might occur if it was presented in written form. Judging from the two studies, past research presents incongruent results regarding the effectiveness of background knowledge. For the present study, in order to investigate the effects of background knowledge support and at the same time improve some of the limitations in previous studies, this study will incorporate the teaching of background knowledge and devise 6.

(8) listening comprehension questions based on the listening passages only. Furthermore, an attempt is also made to devise the background knowledge instruction in the way that has been suggested to induce deeper processing. In this line of research, some researchers proclaim that “learners learn best when they are encouraged to test hypotheses and learn from their mistakes” (Herron et al, 1998, cited in Herron & Tomasello, 1988; 1992). For example, in Herron et al’s (1998) study, they examined the effects of providing major-scene summary in declarative advance organizer condition (AO.) and interrogative advance organizer condition (AO?). The results demonstrated that groups in both conditions outperformed the control group, yet there was no significant difference found between these two conditions. The researchers had originally hypothesized that AO? group would be more effective than AO. Group, based on Anderson’s (1980) Informational Processing Model, which posits that the more meaningful (deeper) the processing of the information is, the better the retention will be. But the results did not turn out to be as expected. Herron et al (1998) explained that it might due to the fact that learners were too occupied in finding answers to initial proposed questions that they forgot to listen for the rest of the information. The researchers therefore suggested that future studies can use the true/false condition that might not be as distractive as AO? condition and thus can overcome such drawback. True/false condition is the type of advance organizer that provides learners with true/false main-scene summaries, but learners have to listen actively to judge their trueness. On the basis of its claim to enhance the processing depth and thus promote better listening comprehension, the present study aims to investigate the true/false mode of background knowledge support. Vocabulary pre-teaching is another variation of pre-listening support that has been drawing much attention in the literature (Chung & Hung, 1998; Chung, 2002; Chang & Read, 2006). Although it is generally acknowledged that a complex 7.

(9) interaction between top-down (prior knowledge) and bottom-up (input) models takes place during listening comprehension processes and that successful activation of the former usually influences the correctness of the subsequent speech perception (Swinney, 1979), higher-level processing still rely much on the lower-level information to make up for details and to attain a more complete and accurate picture. According to the bottom-up model, listeners construct the meaning of listening by starting with “the smallest units of the acoustic message: individual sounds, or phonemes” (Flowerdew & Miller, 2005, p. 24), and then go on combining them into words, phrases, clauses and finally sentences. In this direction of processing, unfamiliar vocabulary is the most-recognized factor that thwarts successful listening comprehension (Chung & Hung, 1998; Chung, 2002; Chang & Read, 2006) and it is also one of the major factors considered to contribute to the difficulty level of listening tasks (Kelly, 1991). Therefore, it seems that if students can overcome the challenge of unfamiliar words, they can be expected to achieve better listening comprehension. As mentioned above, since vocabulary is often the cause to poor listening comprehension, it is imperative to pre-teach those unfamiliar words before students engage in listening tasks. Hayashi (1991) suggested that successful listening comprehension depends on the existence of comprehensible lexical resources. Sun (2002) also conducted an investigation of Taiwanese college students’ listening difficulties, indicating that the perception stage is the most problematic area among Anderson’s (1995) three-phase model of language comprehension. In this specific stage, students tend to forget the meaning of words, even though the words already sound familiar. Thus, a need for key vocabulary pre-teaching is called upon, as being indicated by most of the learners in the past studies. Previous research on the effectiveness of vocabulary pre-teaching, however, is 8.

(10) inconclusive. Chung & Huang (1998) demonstrated that students in “vocabulary” condition outperformed those in “main character” (in which teacher provided descriptions of characters for students) and “combined” conditions. On the contrary, Chung (2002) indicted that the advance organizer, or vocabulary pre-teaching, was less effective than the combined group and question-previewing group, but was still better than the control group. Chang & Read (2006) yielded similar results: in their study, vocabulary instruction was the least helpful type of listening support among the four, and such results held true for both high and low proficiency learners. A question, therefore, arises: why didn’t this mode of pre-listening support do well as expected, since it is the category that has been frequently indicated as the most needed and helpful by L2 learners? Possible reasons for the problem might lie in the nature of the design of vocabulary pre-teaching. In studies mentioned above, instruction on key lexis mainly followed quite similar teaching procedures: teaching L2 words with Chinese translations, repeating L2 pronunciations (Chung & Hung, 1998; Chung, 2002) and listening for those words in longer connected speeches (Chang & Read, 2006). In such procedure, participants might not have sufficient time to process their newly learned lexical knowledge, insomuch that they could not establish easy access to them when processing the whole listening input. Compelled by the above-mentioned problems, this study aims to devise the type of pre-listening vocabulary teaching that strives to enhance the vocabulary learning and contributes to better retention of word knowledge and more solid routes for retrieval when students are engaged in listening tasks. Some insights can be drawn in Jones and Plass’ (2002) study. In their study, they examined the effects of written and pictorial annotations in the multimedia listening comprehension activities. Participants were instructed to look up all annotations available in the treatment. The researchers demonstrated that the combined mode has the best facilitating effects for 9.

(11) both overall listening comprehension and vocabulary acquisition test and that the effects of pictorial annotations persist over time than the written ones. Such results are consistent with Mayer’s theory of Multimedia Effects (2001), which predicts that by being offered information in different modes, rather than just one mode, learners are able to learn better. Similarly, Chun & Plass (1996) contended that “when written and pictorial units were presented contiguously, learners were able to hold the verbal and visual mental representations simultaneously in verbal and visual working memory” (cited in Jones & Plass (2002), p. 548). Jones & Plass’ study (2002) thus suggested that pictorial information is crucial in glossary teaching and teachers should incorporate it into the program (Jones, 2003, 2004; Hunt & Beglar, 2004). Therefore, the present study intends to devise an enhanced vocabulary pre-teaching support that integrates both written and pictorial information, with a hope to improve the conventional word-pair vocabulary instruction. All in all, the present study aims to improve some limitations of the previous related studies, devise enhanced pre-listening supports (background knowledge pre-supplement and vocabulary pre-teaching) and examine their effectiveness in facilitating listening comprehension in the context of Taiwan’s junior high schools.. 1.3 Research Questions Based on the motivation and theoretical background discussed above, five research questions are addressed for the present study: (1) Does enhanced background-knowledge pre-instruction facilitate participants’ listening comprehension? (2) Does enhanced vocabulary pre-teaching facilitate participants’ listening comprehension? (3) On the whole, which type of pre-listening support is more helpful? Enhanced 10.

(12) background-knowledge pre-instruction or enhanced vocabulary pre-teaching? (4) Is there an interaction between types of pre-listening supports and participants’ proficiency level? (5) When participants’ proficiency level is taken into consideration, which type of pre-listening support is more helpful? (6) What are participants’ affective reactions and attitudes toward different types of pre-listening supports?. 1.4 Significance of the Present Study Listening ability is often the area less attended to in EFL contexts, such as Taiwan (Yen, 1987; Cheng, 2000). Yet the complexity of listening process poses much difficulty on the part of learners. Therefore, it has been suggested by quite a few past studies to introduce advance organizers, in this paper termed as “pre-listening supports”, to help facilitate students’ listening comprehension (Mueller, 1980; Omaggio, 1993; Herron, 1994; Herron et al, 1995; Chung, 1999; Jones & Plass, 2002). The major intention of the present study, therefore, is to devise effective and practical pre-listening supports for Taiwanese junior high school learners. The significance lies in two aspects. First, the teaching procedures of two supports are based on the insights of past studies and theories. In other words, this study attempts to explain and compensate for the limited effects of the supports in other studies. Second, the present study hopes to examine the devised pre-teaching supports in a real Taiwanese junior high school context. The empirical experiment is expected to shed light on the effectiveness of advance organizers and point out possible problems, constraints, and pedagogical implications in classroom application.. 11.

(13) 1.5 Definition of Key Terms (1) Advance Organizer “Advance organizer” was first coined by Ausubel (1961) to describe the process of integrating new information with the already-stored resources. As he put it, advance organizers are “introductory material at a higher level of abstraction, generality, and inclusiveness than the learning material itself.” (Ausubel, 1961, p. 252) It serves as a transition to link what has been known and what awaits to be learned. In this study, advance organizers are also referred to as pre-listening supports. (2) Background Knowledge Background knowledge is the knowledge that has already existed in learners’ mind. It is considered to be a synthesis of learners’ preexisting attitudes, experiences, and knowledge (Kujawa & Huske, 1995) and it can be retrieved to “expect or predict aspects in our interpretation of discourse” (Brown & Yule, 1983). With related background/prior knowledge at hand, learners will have more resources to tackle the learning tasks (Markham & Latham, 1987; Long, 1990; Chiang & Dunkel, 1992; Schmidt-Rinehart, 1994; Teng, 1998) (3) Vocabulary Pre-teaching Vocabulary pre-teaching is the type of pre-listening support that provides learners with key vocabulary instruction covered in the forthcoming listening tasks. Bonk (2000) indicated that good listening comprehension is significantly associated with higher text-lexis familiarity. Besides, based on the bottom-up processing model, learners are supposed to interpret the listening discourse from correct interpretation of low-level information, such as vocabulary.. 1.6 Organization of the Thesis This thesis is organized as follows: Chapter Two presents a review regarding 12.

(14) issues involved in the present study. Section 2.1 deals with the concept of listening comprehension and section 2.2 with listening processing models. Section 2.3 reviews the idea of advance organizers, which transits to section 2.4 talking about background knowledge pre-instruction and section 2.5 about key vocabulary pre-teaching. Summary of this chapter is offered in the last section. Chapter Three presents the overall research design. Section 3.1 describes the participants in the study. Section 3.2 gives a detailed report on materials and instruments. Section 3.3 presents the study design and section 3.4 the procedures of empirical experiment. Section 3.5 mentions what statistical tools are used for data analysis. Finally, summary of this chapter is offered in the last section. Chapter Four presents the quantitative and qualitative results of the present study. Section 4.1 deals with descriptive information of the data. Section 4.2 reports the effects of enhanced background knowledge pre-instruction and enhanced vocabulary pre-teaching on participants’ listening comprehension performance. Section 4.3 offers the findings about the interaction between students’ proficiency level and the types of pre-listening supports. Section 4.4 presents participants’ affective responses toward two types of supports. Finally, section 4.5 offers a brief summary. Chapter Five presents the discussion of findings in this study in the order of six research questions. Section 5.1 deals with the effects of two major enhanced pre-listening supports on students’ listening comprehension. Section 5.2 discusses the interaction between types of listening supports and students’ language proficiency. Finally, section 5.3 presents a short summary of this chapter. Chapter Six concludes the present study with major findings summarized in section 6.1, pedagogical implications for EFL teachers in Taiwan in section 6.2, and limitations in section 6.3. 13.

(15) Chapter Two Literature Review. The present study intends to investigate the effects of two pre-listening supports, background knowledge pre-teaching and vocabulary pre-instruction, on Taiwanese junior high school students’ listening comprehension. The focus lies in designing theoretically-informed and theoretically-supported approaches to enhance these two types of advance organizers. Related studies are reviewed in this section. First, section 2.1 initiates the review on the operational concept of listening comprehension, followed by two levels of most commonly used processing models in dealing with listening tasks in section 2.2. Then, section 2.3 continues to review the idea of advance organizers, and it transits to section 2.4 talking about background knowledge pre-instruction. In this section, the schema theory, the issue of how effective this type of support has been in the literature, and the theory-informed enhanced version will all be reviewed. Next comes section 2.5, in which the role of vocabulary in listening comprehension, the issue of how effective this type of support has been in the literature, and again the theory-supported enhanced version will all be included in the review. Finally, the interaction between learners’ listening proficiency level and the types of pre-listening supports will be reviewed in section 2.6. A brief summary of Chapter Two will be presented in the last section.. 2.1. Listening Comprehension Listening comprehension is a “complex and multidimensional process” (Buck,. 2001, p. 51) in which listeners need to use their phonological knowledge, syntactic knowledge, semantic knowledge, pragmatic knowledge, and kinetic knowledge (Buck, 2001; Flowerdew & Miller, 2005) to comprehend an aural input. A number of factors 14.

(16) are involved which collectively determine how successfully a listener understands a listening passage. Fischer and Farris (1995), for example, regarded listening comprehension as a process whereby listeners use their prior knowledge of the topic to actively construct the representation of the aural text. Hoven (1999) added that other factors such as listeners’ interaction with the text, the interlocutor, and the process also influenced listening comprehension. In addition, Rubin (1994) reviewed past related studies and provided a comprehensive description of the factors that are likely to have impact on listening comprehension. He categorized these factors into text characteristics, interlocutor characteristics, task characteristics, listener characteristics, and process characteristics. Since listening comprehension is rather complex, many researchers have been attempting to break down this concept and describe it with sub-skills. Weir (1993) for example provided such a taxonomy which he himself called “a checklist of operation” that listening comprehension involves and that a listening test should comprise: (A) Direct meaning comprehension: . Listening for gist. . Listening for main idea(s) or important information; and distinguishing that from supporting detail or examples. . Listening for specifics, including recall of important details. . Determining speaker’s attitudes/intentions toward a listener or a topic. (B) Inferred meaning comprehension: . Making inferences and deductions. . Relating utterances to their social and situational contexts. . Recognizing the communicative functions of utterances. . Deducing meaning of unfamiliar lexical items form contexts. (C) Contributory meaning comprehension: 15.

(17) . Understanding phonological features. . Understanding grammatical notions such as comparison, cause, result, degree, etc.. . Understanding discourse markers. . Understanding syntactic structures of clauses or idea units. . Understanding cohesions, especially reference. . Understanding lexis and lexical cohesion, especially lexical set membership and collocations. This checklist demonstrates the complexity and multi-dimension of listening comprehension. To deal with listening tasks, two directions of processing are usually called upon. They are reviewed in the following section.. 2.2. Top-down processing & Bottom-up processing Top-down and bottom-up processes are two models exhibiting contrary. “directions of processing” (Field, 2004). Bottom-up processing is more text-based, in which smaller/lower-order units are processed first and then built up to larger/higher-level units (Tsai, 2002). Namely, listeners start with phonemes, sounds, syllables, words, and go on to sentences, paragraphs, discourse, and finally to the whole text. They decode these elements and constitute the meaning of the whole speech based on their syntactic and grammatical knowledge (Hung, 1999). Top-down processing, on the other hand, begins with larger units that indicate the way in which smaller elements should be perceived. In other words, listeners apply world knowledge, topical understanding, or personal experiences to form hypotheses or expectations to interpret the text. Shortly, bottom-up processing relies on perceptual sources whereas top-down processing depends on conceptual ones (Field, 2004). Research has indicated the existence of interaction and interdependence 16.

(18) between bottom-up and top-down models of processing (Buck, 2001; Tsui and Fullilove, 1998; Vandergrief, 2003). The question at issue, however, lies in which direction of processing is preferred, especially when learners’ language proficiency is taken into consideration (Field, 2004). Some research upholds “bottom-up dependency” (Field, 2004, p. 364) for lower-level proficiency learners, claiming that weaker second language listeners put most of their energy in managing to decode every individual word, which prevents them from interpreting the input with higher-level resources (Hansen & Jensen, 1994). Other studies, however, indicate the opposite results. Tsui & Fullilove (1998), for example, favored the position that less proficient learners rely more on the contextual and co-textual information so as to compensate for their insufficient language ability. Field (2004) in his study addressed the issue of how much bottom-up and top-down processing second language learners use in listening tasks. He concluded that when a listener heard an unfamiliar word, s/he may match the meaning of this word with a known word and this match may (a) regardless of context and word-class or (b) draw upon top-down expectations (Field, 2004, p. 374). So when situation (a) occurs, this specific learner will be having more bottom-up dependence; on the contrary, if situation (b) occurs, the learner will be more top-down reliant. In brief, when dealing with a listening task, chances are learners would invoke bottom-up and/or top-down resources, but in regard to which level of processing learners tend to rely more on, consistency is not reached in literature.. 2.3. Advance Organizer As aforementioned, listening comprehension is a rather complicated process,. encompassing different levels of processing and requiring various sub-skills. Therefore, research has introduced the idea of “advance organizers” to language 17.

(19) learning in order to facilitate comprehension. “Advance organizer” was first coined by Ausubel (1961) to describe the process of integrating new information with the already-stored resources in learners’ brains. As he put it, advance organizers are “introductory material at a higher level of abstraction, generality, and inclusiveness than the learning material itself.” (Ausubel, 1961, p. 252) It serves as a transition to link what has already been stored with what waits to be learned. If a new material is subsumable under relevant existing cognitive structures, appropriate advance organizers would enhance its retention. Ample evidence from research has lent support to the positive role of advance organizers in aiding learners to deal with reading or listening tasks. Shrum & Glisan (1994) claimed that the use of context and background information assists students to limit the possible interpretation of reading texts. Likewise, Carr et al. (1977) suggested that by providing students with advance organizers, students can gain reduced imagery and activate pertaining concepts. In listening, Schmidt-Rinehart (1992) mentioned that one of the functions of advance organizers is to “heighten the degree of relevance for listening, so that students feel motivated to listen and will activate what they know as they listen.” In short, it has been generally established that advance organizers are beneficial forms of teaching to both reading and listening tasks.. 2.4. Background Knowledge Pre-Instruction Background knowledge pre-teaching is one of the most investigated advance. organizers that involve top-down processing. Because of its prominence in research and some experiment design problems thereof, this type of pre-listening support is the focus of the present study. In this section, the definition and research operations of background knowledge, the relationship between background knowledge pre-teaching 18.

(20) and listening comprehension, the enhanced form of background knowledge pre-teaching are reviewed in detail.. 2.4.1 Background Knowledge and Schema Theory Background knowledge is the pre-existing knowledge that has been stored in learners’ mind. It is considered to contain learners’ pre-existing attitudes, experiences, and knowledge (Kujawa & Huske, 1995) and can be retrieved to “expect or predict aspects in our interpretation of discourse” (Brown & Yule, 1983). When engaging in listening activities, effective learners do not listen passively, or to rely on the listening input only; instead, they bring in appropriate background knowledge to help them interpret the listening messages. As Shrum and Glisan (1994) put it, “the use of context and background information aids understanding by limiting the number of possible text interpretations” (p. 114). In fact, the related research concerning the role of background knowledge on comprehension began only a few decades ago. Branford, Johnson, Anderson, and other researchers initiated this line of research on L1 language comprehension. Ensuing their study, many L2 researchers started to explore this issue in L2 reading (e.g., Carrell, 1987) and recently, the concern spreads to L1/L2 listening as well. The studies concerning L2 listening have come to recognize the critical role background knowledge plays in facilitating comprehension, and its importance can be best illustrated by “schema theory.” “Schema” are the models stored in our mind and they suggest the interrelationship among concepts. As Rumelhart (1983) (cited in Markham and Latham, 1987, p. 157) describes the concept of schema: There are schemata representing our knowledge about all concepts: underlying objects, situations, events, sequences of events, actions, 19.

(21) and sequences of actions. As part of its specification, schema contains the network of interrelations believed to hold among the constituents of the concept in question. The basic ideas about schema theory posit that “written text, or spoken discourse, does not carry meaning in or of itself; rather, meaning occurs as a result of the interaction between the reader’s or listener’s prior knowledge about the world and the text or speech” (Chiang & Dunkel, 1992, p. 350) Thus, to derive accurate interpretation, learners would attempt to select the most plausible schema from their pre-existing knowledge and integrate it with the new-coming information. They can do this by two principles: (1) the principle of analogy—things will be how they were before, (2) the principle of minimal change—things are as likely as possible to be how they were before (Brown & Yule, 1983, p. 63, cited in Schmidt-Rinehart, 1994, p. 179). So if the new information merges correctly with the old one, successful communication and interpretation is expected to occur, and vice versa.. 2.4.2 The effectiveness of background knowledge in L2 Listening 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 20.

(22) 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 21.

(23) 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 22.

(24) 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 23.

(25) 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.. 2.4.3 Enhanced Pre-listening Support with Visual Contextual Clues Most studies have demonstrated the effectiveness of pre-giving background knowledge to L2 students to aid their listening comprehension. But because of the inconsistent results about the effects of this type of pre-listening support, some studies attempted to strengthen supports by using enhanced teaching design. For example, 24.

(26) Herron et al (1995) incorporated visual contextual clues to achieve such purpose. In their study, two types of advance organizers were compared, Description Only and Description + Pictures. In the former support, the instructor read aloud six main-scene sentences that summarize the following video, and in the latter, same procedures were applied with the addition of showing students pictures that are related to the context, but not the direct translation of each main-scene sentence. Thirty-nine FL students participated in the study. After the treatment, they were asked to write down answers to short questions as completely as possible (The answers cannot be found in the advance organizer and they can be found in the listening text only.) Results indicated that Description + Pictures group outperformed Description Only group and the students gave positive affective feedbacks to this type of support as well. This study demonstrated further advantages of enhanced background knowledge support, because participants can utilize both verbal descriptions and contextual clues to process more deeply and thus attain better comprehension. The effects of visual clues is also explored in Mueller’s study (1980). As he indicated, visual information provides contextual clues which were shown to facilitate listening comprehension for less proficient learners. He argued that one-mode learning (such as L1-L2 translation) may be sufficient for high proficient learners, but lower proficient learners need dually-coded approach to help them effectively process information. Therefore, he contended that the combination of verbal and visual information would result in more successful learning. As far as the order of the presentation of visual cues is concerned, Mueller found that Visual Before group performed better than Visual After group. He explained that it is because when students see the visuals before hand, they are less likely to “formulate wrong hypothesis and consequently better able to guess the meaning of unfamiliar words and phrases” (cited in Mueller, 1980, p. 340). Also, having visual clues before listening 25.

(27) tasks is believed to heighten students’ interests and thus motivates them to pay closer attention to the upcoming passage. Herron et al’s study (1995) is an example of enhanced background knowledge pre-listening support that aids listening comprehension. The underlying theory to account for such result builds on Anderson’s Information Processing Model (Anderson, 1980). Briefly, this model posits that greater depth of processing would take place if teachers can “elaborate the expressions at the time of encoding” (Herron et al, 1998, cited on p. 230). In Herron et al’s study, participants had access to both verbal and visual contextual clues, thus they could process information more deeply, and in turn comprehend better. In other words, if students have more revenues to processing, they can achieve better comprehension. More details about the model will be reviewed in section 2.4.5. Although positive effects have been widely acknowledged in the literature regarding the enhancing effects of visual contextual clues, background knowledge pre-teaching can also be enhanced with another alternative form of teaching. This type of enhanced pre-listening support was proposed by Herron et al (1998), which is reviewed in detail in the following section.. 2.4.4 Enhanced Background Knowledge Pre-Instruction Herron et al (1998) conducted an inspiring study that drew upon learners’ background knowledge to design an enhanced form of pre-listening support. Unlike their study in 1995, they did not resort to visual contextual clues, but they were interested in exploring the different forms of background descriptions. To be more specific, they attempted to investigate how effective declarative and interrogative presentation of prior knowledge is respectively. Two experimental groups were thus devised, that is, AO. group (advance organizer declarative condition) and AO? group 26.

(28) (advance organizer interrogative condition). For the former treatment, the teacher read aloud in chronological order six sentences on the board that are the summary of forthcoming listening passage. For the latter, the teacher repeated the same procedure but this time the six sentences were presented in an interrogative format, with three possible answers appended for each question, but without any indication of which one is correct. The purpose of devising AO? condition is to examine whether the hypothetically more enhanced listening support can in reality induce better comprehension, because according to Anderson’s information processing model, students in AO? condition were supposed to listen more actively so as to decide which answer is correct. Afterwards, participants were engaged in answering six short questions as comprehension check, but the answers to these questions cannot be found in advance organizers. Results, however, showed no significant difference between two experimental groups, though both of them were significantly better than control group. The researchers explained it was possible that the students were too focused in finding answers to questions in interrogative condition that they were less concentrated on listening to the whole picture of listening passages. To compensate for the drawbacks, Herron et al (1998) suggested another alternative advance organizer that is also hypothesized to enhance the depth of processing: a true/false condition. This is a hybrid of both declarative and interrogative conditions, in which students would be provided with declarative sentences that may be true or false. Students need to listen attentively to decide whether the descriptions are true or not, but they do not need to look for answers to them. Therefore, this true/false condition, according to the researchers, would be less distracting than AO? condition. The tenets here are that because learners need to question the truth of these background sentences and test for their hypotheses, they would foster deeper processing and learn best and retain the most information (Herron 27.

(29) & Tomasello, 1988, 1992; Tomasello & Herron, 1988). More details about Information Processing Model will be reviewed in the next section. The present study attempts to take up this line of research and examine the validity of true/false enhanced background knowledge support.. 2.4.5 Theory of Information Processing Proposed in cognitive psychology, the model of information processing maintains that how expressions are originally presented to learners affects the degree of information retention (Anderson, 1980). Generally, the more meaningful and deeper the processing of information is when it is presented to learners, the better the retention of information will be. The enhancement of the depth of information can be reached by “elaborating the expressions at the time of encoding” (Herron et al, 1998, p. 239). Teachers can do this by incorporating visual aids, gestures, and other forms of elaboration techniques. Among them, hypothesis testing is one mean to deeper processing. Past studies have shown that students learn a foreign language better when they are encouraged to test self-formulated hypothesis and learn from mistakes (Herron & Tomasello, 1988; Herron & Tomasello, 1992; Tomasello & Herron, 1998). As mentioned before, Herron et al (1998) in their inspirational study examined this claim by devising AO. (advance organizer declarative) and AO? (advance organizer interrogative) modes of pre-listening support activities. The difference between these two supports is that the latter did not directly offer participants main-scene summary but instead converted it into pre-listening questions and asked students to choose correct answers; it is thus hypothesized to enhance the depth of processing. Although the final outcome showed no statistical difference between the two, Herron et al suggested the truth/false mode and called for future investigation.. 28.

(30) 2.5. Key Vocabulary Pre-Teaching Vocabulary pre-instruction is one of the most explored advance organizers that. involve bottom-up processing. Due to its importance in literature and relatively opposing results about its effects on comprehension, this type of pre-listening support is another focus in the current study. In this section, discussion on the role of vocabulary in listening comprehension, related studies concerning its effectiveness in aiding listening comprehension, and the enhanced vocabulary pre-teaching support are reviewed in detail.. 2.5.1 Role of Vocabulary in Listening Comprehension The question of whether there is a ‘linguistic threshold’ for interlanguage learners has always been a target of debate. Those who argue for its existence maintain that a learner will be able to retrieve his L1 background knowledge and learning strategies only after his L2 language ability reaches a certain level (a threshold). In other words, he is not likely to utilize these resources under the condition that his insufficient language proficiency blocks his access to them. Vandergrief (2006), for example, addressed this issue. He examined two opposing stances, Linguistic Threshold Hypothesis (ITH) and Linguistic Interdependence Hypothesis (LIH), and further investigated their interrelationship with question types (in this case, inferential questions and literal questions.) Seventy-five grade eight English-speaking learners of French participated in the study. They were required to complete multiple choice questions, both literal and inferential, after listening to authentic English and French dialogues. Results indicated that both L1 listening ability and L2 proficiency played significant roles to L2 listening comprehension, but L2 proficiency was an even stronger predictor (25% variance v.s. 14% variance). Furthermore, when question types were taken into consideration, both factors 29.

(31) significantly contributed to the answer of literal questions, but L2 proficiency took up more importance. However, for inferential questions, only L2 proficiency accounted for a significant amount of variance. The researchers therefore pointed to two pedagogical implications, that is, the importance of developing L2 vocabulary and metacognitive strategies in L2 listening. Linguistic Threshold Hypothesis (ITH) stresses the importance of L2 language ability, and among them, vocabulary is one of the components that is most frequently singled out for discussion. In the field of reading, there has already been much research addressing this issue. Laufer (1989, 1992) for instance, found that 95% or more of the lexical tokens is a threshold to guarantee reasonable comprehension of written texts. In the field of listening, Bonk (2000) also shed some light on the issue. He delved to examine the interaction between learners’ lexical knowledge and their listening comprehension by giving them both L1 recall test (as comprehension check) and dictation test (as measurement of vocabulary familiarity). Results suggested no particular lexical threshold for achieving good listening comprehension across all language levels. Yet results showed that good/acceptable comprehension is significantly correlated with higher text-lexis familiarity: 70%-79% for some listeners, and 80%-100% for the great majority. Therefore, as suggested by this study, the importance of vocabulary knowledge in listening comprehension cannot be underestimated. The prominent role of vocabulary in L2 listening comprehension is also revealed by learners’ indication of learning weaknesses. Some studies indicated that the most problematic area in the listening process that most EFL learners regard to hamper their comprehension falls on the unfamiliarity of vocabulary. Sun (2002) for example conducted an investigation of Taiwanese college students’ listening difficulties and reported that students tend to forget the meaning of words, even when 30.

(32) the words sound familiar in the perception stage. Students mentioned that they usually got stuck or distracted when hearing unfamiliar words and this usually had negative impact on their listening comprehension. They thus voiced the need for instruction on vocabulary before doing listening tasks (Chung & Huang, 1998; Chung, 2002, Tsai, 2002). In short, the above mentioned stresses the significance of vocabulary in L2 listening comprehension and advocates the need to pre-teach unfamiliar words that will be covered in the upcoming listening passages. There were indeed some studies aiming to explore the effects of this type of pre-listening support on learners’ listening comprehension and they are reviewed in the following section.. 2.5.2 The Effectiveness of Vocabulary Pre-Instruction Although the role of vocabulary in L2 listening comprehension process has been acknowledged to be eminent (e.g., Bonk, 2000), the effectiveness of pre-teaching unfamiliar words as a type of listening support is inconclusive though. In the literature, Chung & Huang (1998) investigated the effects of three types of advance organizers—(1) main characters (2) vocabulary (3) combination of the two—on students’ comprehension of L2 videos. A hundred and sixty EFL low-intermediate Taiwanese students participated in this study. For the first group, the instructor provided students with descriptions of the main characters, such as their names and professions. For the second group, the instructor extracted the vocabulary from listening scripts that they considered unfamiliar to their students. Then they spelled out words, offered L1 translations, and asked students to practice their pronunciations. Finally, students took multiple-choice tests on the content of the videos and filled out an open-ended questionnaire as well. Results showed that the performance of the vocabulary group was significantly better than the main character 31.

(33) group and the combined group. The fact that the combined group performed the worst prompted the researchers to remind teachers that students’ proficiency level and motivation should be taken into consideration before deciding the amount of pre-listening activities. Contrary to Chung and Huang’s study (1998), Chung’s another study (2002) yielded different results. In this study, she mainly examined the effects of three types of pre-listening supports—question previewing, vocabulary pre-teaching, and combined treatment—on EFL Taiwanese college students’ listening comprehension of videos. She also attempted to see if there is an interaction between types of advance organizers and test types (multiple-choice test and open-ended tests). The treatment for the vocabulary group was similar to that in Chung & Huang (1998), namely, providing students with L1-L2 word pairs and the practice on pronunciation. Results indicated that the combined group had the best performance across test types and the vocabulary pre-teaching group performed only better than the control group. In addition, it was found that the effects of question pre-viewing was assessment-task dependent; in this case, question pre-viewing is more effective for multiple-choice questions than for open-ended questions. Another study that also involves the investigation of vocabulary pre-instruction is the one carried out by Chang & Read (2006) as reviewed in section 2.4.2. In their study, the pre-teaching of unfamiliar words comprised giving students L1 (Chinese) equivalent meanings, L2 pronunciations, and also the listening of target words in longer connected speeches. However, results showed the ineffectiveness of this type of advance organizer, indicating that it was the least helpful type regardless of students’ listening proficiency. The reasons may be, as one of the participants mentioned, that students seemed not to be able to access to their newly learned words in such short time: 32.

(34) Even though I had more confidence in taking the test beforehand, when I heard the recordings, I could not think fast enough of words I had practiced to understand the talk. When I figured out the meaning, I had missed some of the talk, and finally I felt that I just understood a few words, which simply did not help me understand the talk. (Cited in Chang & Read, 2006, p. 392) In short, past studies did not agree on the effectiveness of vocabulary pre-instruction listening support on helping learners’ comprehension. Therefore, the concern of whether pre-teaching vocabulary should be permanently viewed as the least helpful type of advance organizers or whether some improvements can be made to the teaching of vocabulary is worth further investigation. In the following section, some studies that were designed to enhance vocabulary instruction are reviewed to shed some light.. 2.5.3 Enhanced Vocabulary Pre-Teaching Literature has not yet agreed upon the effects of vocabulary pre-teaching on facilitating L2 learners’ listening comprehension. Some studies held positive views toward this type of pre-listening support (e.g. Chung & Huang, 1998) whereas others did not (e.g. Chang & Read, 2006). One possible reason accounting for the ineffectiveness of vocabulary pre-teaching in some studies is that the vocabulary instruction itself only involves the teaching of basic L1-L2 word pairs and their pronunciations. Thus, learners are less likely to effectively relate the L2 words with their translations and thus less likely to retrieve their word knowledge when engaging in listening tasks. Jones & Plass (2002) conducted a research which provides some thoughts for the issue. They investigated the effects of two types of annotations in video-viewing activities. One hundred and seventy one FL college students were randomly divided into four treatment groups: (1) text with no annotation, (2) text with only written 33.

(35) annotation, (3) text with only pictorial annotation, (4) text with both written and pictorial annotations. After listening to computer-based materials, they were asked to take a written multiple-choice vocabulary post-test and a written recall posttest. Three weeks later, they took the same test again as the delay test. Results indicated that the combination of annotations is the most helpful listening support for students to recall both the listening passage and the newly learned vocabulary in the delayed test. But what deserves our attention is the comparison between written annotations and pictorial annotations. The study showed that in both immediate and delay tests, pictorial annotation group performed better than written annotation group. Furthermore, the difference between the pictorial group and combination group reached marginal significance in the immediate posttest but such significance decayed in the delay test. Therefore, it seemed to suggest that the power of pictorial annotations persist with time. Based on the research results, Jones & Plass contended that pictorial information supports both micro- and macro-level processing, thus aiding verbal and visual mental representations in the working memory and helping them enter the long-term memory as well. Kellogg and Howe (1971) also suggested that L2 words associated with visual images can be learned more easily than those that do not have them. Therefore, these studies argued that the role of pictures in the vocabulary instruction should deserve more concern. In the literature, however, few studies incorporated the pictorial information in the teaching of new words for listening. But Tsai’s study (2002) is one example that implemented this method. In his study, the researcher attempted to compare the effectiveness of two types of pre-listening activities: target word instruction method and gist prediction method. Two intact classes, totaling one hundred and two English-major college students, participated in the study; they were also categorized 34.

(36) into more proficient and less proficient learners based on the pre-test. Class A received instruction on vocabulary, in which they were supplied with meaning-related visual aids, such as pictures, charts, magazines, fliers, or body actions, along with pronunciation practices and oral example sentences. Class B, on the other hand, was presented with the passage title, topic sentence of each paragraph, some pre-listening questions and a teacher-led discussion. Results showed that after receiving pre-listening instruction, participants in both classes did significantly better in their posttest, but there was no significant main effect difference whatsoever between the two types of pre-listening supports. However, if students’ proficiency level was being considered, it was revealed that target word instruction method did not help much for high-proficiency learners, but gist-prediction method exerted beneficial effects on both levels of language learners. Briefly, this study supported the value of vocabulary instruction with the incorporation of visual aids, yet indicated the caveat to consider student’s proficiency level. As inspired by Jones and Plass (2002) and Tsai (2002)’s studies, we believed that enhanced vocabulary pre-instruction should include effective pictorial information to supplement the traditional L1-L2 translation presentation. Such decision could be supported by Mayer’s (1997, 2001, 2003) Generative Theory of Multimedia Learning, which posits that when information is supplied in different presentation modes, rather than just one mode, better learning effects can be expected. (More details about this theory will be reviewed in section 2.5.4.) As a result, it seems plausible to integrate the traditional L1-L2 word pair with the pictorial information to solidate students’ retention of vocabulary knowledge. Aside from the efforts to enhance the presentation of unfamiliar words, literature indicated that teaching and learning words in context plays a crucial role in vocabulary learning (Hunt & Beglar, 2002). Past studies have acknowledged the 35.

(37) importance of teaching form and pronunciation and of practicing saying new words in vocabulary instruction (Channell, 1988; Ellis & Beaton, 1993). As to how to relate L2 form with its semantic meaning, a growing trend has been proposing the idea of learning new words in contexts to take place of traditional word-pair translation method. Prince (1996) for example investigated the effects of vocabulary learning respectively through context and translation and further examined how the word learning method interacted with learners’ proficiency level. Results suggested that learners could learn a larger number of new words by translation learning regardless of their proficiency level; however, less proficient learners are unable to transfer the knowledge of new words they learned from translation method into L2 contexts, thus revealing the potential weaknesses of word-pair vocabulary learning. As suggested by Wiseman & Tulving (1976), one obvious setback of over-reliance on L1 translation is that learners are likely to depend on a single “trace” in memory and they are less able to retrieve the word knowledge when encountering different contexts. But learning words in contexts, on the contrary, provides learners with richer contextual clues and more dynamic, multiple “traces” of meaning retrieval (Wiseman & Tulving, 1976). In short, given the importance of learning words in contexts, the present study will also include such learning method in vocabulary pre-instruction. Although learning vocabulary in context is promising as the above suggested, it seems that this method of learning requires much work on the part of learners than the traditional translation method. Prince (1996) indicated three steps that learners need to process before extracting the meaning of target vocabulary from contexts: (a) to process the sentences to gain sufficient understating of it, (b) to use that understating to infer the meaning of the unknown word, and (c) to associate the meaning with the form of the unknown word in such a way that a representation is formed that is available for future use (cited from Prince (1996), p. 481). Because of this arduous 36.

(38) work, weaker learners are usually less likely to benefit from context learning (Cohen and Aphek, 1980). Therefore, it is compulsory to help weaker learners (including beginner learners) deal with the difficulty of processing syntactic structures usually found within context. The present study thus designs sentence practices that offer contextual clues but have both clear semantic connotation and simple syntactic structures so as not to overwhelm learners. This sentence practice will function as a means to reviewing newly-learned words and not as the means to learning it. Three reasons further account for why sentence practice exercises are employed in the current study. First, Schmitt & Schmitt (1995) confirmed the positive effects of sentence example practices. Among the eleven principles they advocated, one of them is the “retrieval practice effect” (Baddeley, 1990). This principle claims that the act of recalling a word results in higher chances for future recall. Therefore, if learners have an opportunity to recall their newly-learned vocabulary when they do sentence practices, chances are that they would have better retrieval of word knowledge. Second, the fact that current study employed sentence practice soon after the presentation of new words can be supported by the principle of “expanding rehearsal.” This principle advocates to “review new materials right after the initial meeting” (Schmitt & Schmitt, 1995, p. 136) so that better learning can be expected. Finally, sentence practice exercise also helps promote deeper mental processing as Craik and Lockhart (1972) suggested. Their hypothesis claimed that “if mental activities can be made to require more thoughts and manipulation, it could help learners to better learn the word” (cited in Schmitt & Schmitt, 1995, p. 135). In conclusion, drawing on related methods and theories about vocabulary instruction, the current study will incorporate L1-L2 word pair presentation supplemented with pictorial information and along with sentence practices to maximize the effectiveness of vocabulary learning. And this package of vocabulary 37.

(39) teaching/learning will be referred to as enhanced vocabulary pre-instruction in the present study.. 2.5.4 Generative Theory of Multimedia Learning Generative theory of multimedia learning proposed by Mayer (1997, 2001) mainly maintained that by offering students choices toward the availability of different modes of information, students will be directed to most effective learning. For example, in Jones’ study (2003), learners could resort to different modes of annotations, both visual and verbal, which were designed to illustrate the meanings of unfamiliar words. So when students were engaged in listening tasks, they would develop visual and verbal mental representations and organize and integrate them with their own mental model of the aural input. Such a process is likely to result in greater possibility of successful learning for at least two reasons. First, since it is unavoidable to have individual differences among students, multimedia learning could provide students a leeway to choose suitable learning mode that is most compatible with their learning styles (Plass et al, 1998). Second, because students have access to both visual and verbal information, they would develop referential associations between these two modes; such increased interaction of available resources leads to richer retrieval routes of new lexicon (Chun & Plass, 1996) as well as greater integration and recall of the aural messages (Meskill, 1996). In other words, students can form connections among verbal, visual, and aural mental representations to help themselves better construe meanings (Jones, 2003).. 2.6. Interaction between Learners’ Listening Proficiency Level and Types of Listening Supports As Rubin (1994) suggested, listener characteristics is one of the five major 38.

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分類法,以此分類法評價高中數學教師的數學教學知識,探討其所展現的 SOTO 認知層次及其 發展的主要特徵。本研究採用質為主、量為輔的個案研究法,並參照自 Learning

• 第三種教學觀認為,教學的目的是改變學生對事物、現象 的理解。教學( Teaching )的焦點是學生對學習內容的理解 和掌握。教師須瞭解學生想什麼

初中聆聽範 疇的學與教 策略-