CHAPTER ONE INTRODUCTION
1.1 Motivation
In the past few decades, the importance of listening has gradually been recognized. The importance of listening can be shown from several respects. First, it is a crucial means of communication. Oxford (1993) pointed out that to cultivate the ability of communication, listening should be the major concern in an L2 classroom.
Some researchers viewed it as one essential and fundamental language skill in communication (Brown & Yule, 1983; Oxford, 1993; Rost, 1990, 1994; Rubin, 1994;
Underwood, 1989; Ur, 1984).
Besides, listening plays a significant role in language acquisition and learning (Dunkel, 1986; Feyten, 1991; Postovsky, 1978; Rost, 1990; Vandergrift, 1997).
Vandergrift (1997) indicated that “Of the four language skills, listening is perhaps the most critical for language learning at the beginning stages…Listening internalizes the rules of language and facilitates the emergence of other language skills”(p. 387).
Moreover, the study of Feyten (1991) proved that listening ability was significantly related to both foreign language proficiency and foreign language oral proficiency skills. Chen (1993) further concluded that better listeners were also better learners of other language skills and their learning attitudes were more active.
The importance of listening can also be reflected from the fact that both adults and children spend much time in listening in their daily lives. In fact, among the four language skills, listening probably accounted for the largest proportion of time.
Feyten (1991) mentioned that “…as Robert points out, Rankin, in 1926, found listening to be the most frequently used mode of human communication…” (p.174).
Oxford (1993) also agreed that listening was the most frequently used language skill by mentioning that “In our culture it is estimated that ‘close to 90% of class time in
high school and college is spent listening to discussion and lectures’ (Taylor, 1964)”
(p. 206). The study of Rankin (1928) found that adults spent about 42 percent in listening, 32 percent in speaking, 15 percent in reading and 11 percent in writing when communicating with others in life1. Similarly, Rivers (1981) pointed out that people listened twice as much as they spoke, four times more than they read, and five times more than they wrote in daily lives. According to Rost (1994), children spent at least 50 percent of classroom time listening by estimation. Obviously, listening proficiency affects every aspect of our lives.
In Taiwan, listening has received more and more attention. One possible reason is that the Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) is adopted in class; therefore, more listening activities are incorporated in the textbooks. Another reason is that teachers and students now have more access to CDs, MP3s, VCDs, DVDs, and the Internet. The other reason is that high school teachers often include listening tests in their monthly tests. Some departments of college even demand applicants to pass the GEPT 2 (General English Proficiency Test) first for the admission via recommendation.
Despite the changes, however, there is still much room for the improvement of the learning, teaching, and testing of listening in Taiwan. As far as listening learning is concerned, although many students in Taiwan consider listening a significant language skill and have a strong need to improve listening (Lai, 1984; Lee, 1997;
Teng,1996; Wang, 2002), most students still encounter various difficulties in listening (Chen, 1987; Yen, 1987) and their listening performance is often considered poor (Lai, 1984; Wang, 2000). Wang (2002) investigated the listening strategy use of senior high
1 Rankin (1928) used 21 adults to find out how they spent their waking time in using four language skills for communication in life during 60 days.
2 The GEPT is a standardized test developed by the Language Training & Testing Center, Taipei, Taiwan, in which four language skills are tested.
school students and found that more than half of the sample (55.2%) considered their listening ability poor and none rated their listening ability as very good. The study of Yen (1988) indicated that even the college students of the English department encountered many difficulties in listening and their listening performance was far from satisfactory. Besides, Lai (1984) surveyed 19 senior high schools and found the highest percentage (40.4%) of the subjects considered listening was the poorest one among the four language skills. These results point to the fact clearly that more instruction in listening would be necessary. To be more specific, it was found that most subjects did not receive enough instruction about how to listen (Chao & Wang, 2002; Chien & Li, 1997; Lee, 1997; S. H. Lin, 2000; Teng, 1996).
In fact, since listening has not been incorporated in the Basic Competency Test and the college entrance examination in Taiwan for decades, most teachers would not pay enough attention to the teaching of listening (Yen, 1988) in this exam-oriented society. As a result, many teachers are not very confident in teaching listening compared to the teaching of the other three skills. Besides, most teachers are not aware of learning strategies and their aftereffects (Chien & Li, 1997; Huang, 2003;
O’Malley et al., 1985). Consequently, it is not surprising to find that teachers depend mostly on their own teaching experiences, and simply give listening tests or provide chances to listen without much guidance in teaching students how to listen.
When it comes to testing the listening skills, there existed a number of problems such as the lack of generally accepted theoretical bases (Teng, 1998), the influence by the model of reading comprehension (Yen, 1988), testing recognition rather than comprehension (Wdowski, 1999), testing memory instead of comprehension, and the involving of reading and writing abilities. These problems are still not fully explored by researchers. Due to the limitation of awareness in designing a listening comprehension test, a teacher usually depends solely on his or her personal
experiences (Teng, 1998). Thus, the validity and reliability of the listening comprehension test developed in the way are seriously doubted.
Based on these reasons and observations, I would like to conduct a study to explore more about listening. To be more specific, I want to investigate test effects, text effects, strategy use, and the relationship between Test Formats/text types and strategy use. Test Effects and text effects are examined to provide teachers with the information about choosing Test Formats and text types while designing a listening test. To probe into strategy use, we may find out if there are some strategies distinguishing effective listeners from less effective listeners so that teachers can provide students with a proper strategy training to elevate their listening performance.
The purpose of exploring the relationship between Test Formats/text types and strategy use is to offer more insights about what strategies contribute to good listening performance on certain Test Formats/text types. If these strategies do exist, teachers can teach them to students to improve their listening performance. It is hoped that the study can help teachers, teaching material designers, and students understand more about listening and shed light on listening testing and teaching of senior high schools in Taiwan.
1.2 Theoretical Background
Listening is the most neglected and the least understood one of the four language skills in second or foreign language instruction (Abbot & Wingard, 1981; Belasco, 1965; Call, 1985; Chastain, 1976; Glisan, 1985; Landry, 1969). Its process is not easily observed (Anderson & Lynch, 1988; Call, 1985; Dunkel, 1986; Glisan, 1985) and its difficulties are likely to be neglected (Yen, 1988). For first language learners, listening comprehension seems a natural process; therefore, it is often taken for granted and can be acquired without having to make efforts in learning it (Chien & Li,
1997; Landry, 1969; Teng, 1997). However, the truth is that it is not something mastered once and for all; instead, it takes long-period development (Anderson &
Lynch, 1988) especially for second or foreign language learners. Actually, listening is a complex active interpretive process (Anderson & Lynch, 1988; Brown & Yule, 1983;
Call, 1985; Dunkel, 1986; Glisan, 1985; O’Malley et al., 1989; Richards, 1983; Rost, 1990; Teng, 1997; Thompson & Rubin, 1996; Underwood, 1989), which involves various factors.
The factors affecting listening comprehension have been identified by many researchers. For instance, Boyle (1984) examined the factors most frequently appeared in the literature on listening comprehension and classified them into three types: listener factors, speaker factors, and factors in the material and medium.
Besides, Anderson and Lynch (1988) mentioned three major categories of factors, including the types of language, the task or purpose of listening, and the context where listening takes place. They also identified four main characteristics of language input affecting the difficulty level of comprehension: the organization of input, the explicitness of content, the type of listening texts and the topic familiarity of listeners.
As for Oxford (1990), the ability of using learning strategies of listeners is also one principal factor of listening comprehension.
In the review of Rubin (1994), five major factors affecting listening comprehension emerged. They were text characteristics, interlocutor characteristics, task characteristics, listener characteristics, and process characteristics. The text characteristics include acoustic-temporal variables, other acoustic variables, morphological and syntactic modifications, text type, and the amount of text. The interlocutor characteristics include gender and proficiency. The task characteristics refer to task types. The listener characteristics include language proficiency, memory, attention, affect, age, gender, learning disabilities in L1, background knowledge,
aptitude, and processing skills. The process characteristics include top-down processing, bottom-up processing, listening strategies, note-taking, strategy training, and negotiation of comprehensible input. The milieu factors refer to the noise in the physical setting, and the quality of recording.
Among these factors, Test Effects, text effects and listening strategies are often discussed. Test Effects and text effects are concerned with the design of listening tests, while listening strategy use may be another way to improve listening instruction. By conducting the present study, it is hoped that more awareness in these issues can be gained.
1.3 Research Questions
The five research questions of the present study are as follows:
1. How do senior high school students respond to tests with/without pictures while taking a listening test?
2. What effects do texts have on the listening performance of senior high school students?
3. What is the listening strategy use of senior high school students?
4. Is there any relationship between test formats and listening strategies? If yes, how are they related to each other?
5. Is there any relationship between text types and listening strategies? If yes, how are they related to each other?
1.4 Significance of the Study
Though there have been some studies conducted on test effects, text effects or
strategy use, consistent conclusions and a complete understanding of these issues are still unavailable. What’s worth noting is that among these studies, no one explored the
relationship between test formats and listening strategy use and the relationship between text types and listening strategy use. Therefore, the researcher decided to conduct the present research to add to the awareness about these issues.
The findings of the present study will contribute to both listening testing and instruction. As for listening testing, the findings about test effects and text effects can help teachers choose proper test formats and text types according to the proficiency levels of students and purpose of tests. With regard to listening instruction, on the one hand, the findings about strategy use can offer teachers the useful information about training students how to use listening strategies to improve their listening performance. On the other hand, the findings about the relationship between test formats/text types and listening strategy use give teachers concrete and useful suggestions to improve students’ listening performance. Therefore, teachers will be more confident and enjoy teaching listening more, and students can also obtain more practical guidance in using listening strategies.
1.5 Organization of the Thesis
The thesis is organized as follows. Chapter Two reviews the issues and related studies of the research questions. Chapter Three introduces the methodology and presents the results of the present experiment. Chapter Four discusses the findings concerning the research questions. Finally, Chapter Five concludes the major findings and discusses the implications and limitations of the study together with some suggestions for future research.
