Exploring English Listening Difficulties of Taiwanese EFL students: An Analysis of New TOEIC
林秋蓉、陳建志
E-mail: 363548@mail.dyu.edu.tw
ABSTRACT
This is a research for a Master Degree thesis, which aims to access and analyze EFL learners’ listening difficulties in Taiwan. In the study, there were 120 English majored students (30 students per year), at a university in the central Taiwan, participating in the study. The participants took an approximate 45-minute New TOEIC listening test and then immediately followed the survey of the awareness of their own listening difficulties. The results of the listening test demonstrate that the Taiwanese EFL learners performed significantly less efficient in inference making (listeners listening experience) and details memorizing (memory) than the other factors (i.e. interpreting gist, recognizing speakers’ accents, organizing context, understanding words and recognizing similar sound ). The results of the survey show that, in the students’ beliefs, the abilities of “lexicon” and “recognizing individual sounds” (linguistic knowledge) are the most difficult listening tasks for them. Consequently, it shows that there is a significant gap between learners’
self-awareness and their real performance. These two results were brought into a further discussion with linguistic perspectives.
Keywords : listening inference making、details memorizing、the awareness of listening difficulties、listening performance、words with similar sound、interpreting gist
Table of Contents
COVER PAGE ENGLISH SIGNATURE PAGE SIGNATURE PAGE ABSTRACT (English) iv ABSTRACT(Chinese) v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS vi TABLE OF CONTENTS vii LIST OF TABLES xi LIST OF FIGURES xii Chapter I.
Introduction 1 1.1 Background 1 1.2 Motivation 2 1.3 Purposes 4 1.4 Research Questions 4 1.5 Significance of the study 5 1.6 Organization of this Study 6 Chapter II. Literature Review 7 2.1 Theories Related to Listening Comprehension 7 2.1.1 Listening processing 7 2.1.2 Listening comprehension 9 2.1.3 Competences Required for Listening 11 2.1.4 Listening Cognitive Constraints 14 2.1.5 EFL Listeners’ Difficulties 18 2.2 Difficulties of Listening Comprehension 21 2.3 Strategies for Listening Comprehension 22 Chapter III. Methodology 25 3.1 Participants 25 3.2 Hypotheses 26 3.3 Research design 27 3.4 Instruments 27 3.4.1 New TOEIC Listening Comprehension Test 28 3.4.2 The Motivation of using New TOEIC as the listening material 30 3.4.3 Seven Listening Tasks in New TOEIC Listening Test 30 3.4.4 The survey of the awareness of EFL listening difficulties. 34 3.5 Procedures and Data Collection 35 3.6 Data Analysis Method 36 3.7 The pilot Study 36 3.8 The Main Study 41 3.8.1 The Listening Study:
Linguistic vs. Nonlinguistic listening tasks 41 3.8.2 The Survey: The Listening Study: Linguistic vs. Nonlinguistic Self-Listening Strategy 45 Chapter IV. Results and Discussion 50 4.1 Analysis of EFL Learners’ Listening Difficulties 50 4.2 Comparing Listening Difficulties among Learners of Different Proficiency 55 4.3 Students’ awareness of Listening Difficulties 59 Chapter V.
Conclusion 63 5.1 Summary of the Findings 63 5.2 Limitations and Suggestions of the Study 65 5.3 Pedagogical Implication of the Study 66 Reference 68 Appendix 1 78 Appendix 2 79 Appendix 3 80 Appendix 4 114 Appendix 5 116
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