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1.1. Background of the study Although listening is now well recognized as a critical dimension in language learning, it still remains one of the least understood processes. According to Morley (2001), during the 1980s special attention to listening was incorporated into new instructional frameworks, that is, functional language and communicative approaches. Throughout the 1990s, attention to listening in language instruction increased dramatically. Until recently, there have been several studies of developing listening comprehension, one of which is repeated listening approach. According to Krashen and Dupuy’s findings, repeated listening could increase second language learners’ listening comprehension. It was discovered that repeated listening could help language learners achieve listening comprehension effectively. It is known as a very cheap, useful one to selfenhance listening comprehension. Language learners these days including AGU students, however, still struggle with finding a right method to practice listening and to improve listening comprehension. As a result, there have been AGU students galore, even graduated ones, considering listening skill as the greatest fear in their English learning, which leads them to fall in communication with the others. Knowing the seriousness of this problem, a survey on the effects of repeated listening on junior English ma
DH14TA-Lê Huỳnh Diễm Xương-Trần Thị Diệu Minh PROPOSAL Background of the study Although listening is now well recognized as a critical dimension in language 1.1 learning, it still remains one of the least understood processes According to Morley (2001), during the 1980s special attention to listening was incorporated into new instructional frameworks, that is, functional language and communicative approaches Throughout the 1990s, attention to listening in language instruction increased dramatically Until recently, there have been several studies of developing listening comprehension, one of which is repeated listening approach According to Krashen and Dupuy’s findings, repeated listening could increase second language learners’ listening comprehension It was discovered that repeated listening could help language learners achieve listening comprehension effectively It is known as a very cheap, useful one to self-enhance listening comprehension Language learners these days including AGU students, however, still struggle with finding a right method to practice listening and to improve listening comprehension As a result, there have been AGU students galore, even graduated ones, considering listening skill as the greatest fear in their English learning, which leads them to fall in communication with the others Knowing the seriousness of this problem, a survey on the effects of repeated listening on junior English majors’ listening comprehension at AGU is conducted to give a helpful approach of developing listening comprehension to AGU students, especially to English majors According to the personal experience of Krashen in 1996 and the large-scale study of Dupuy in 1999, repeated listening brings positive results to language learners which help them enhance not only listening comprehension, fluency but also vocabulary Hence, this dissertation will re-verify that to see whether repeated listening approaches help enhance AGU students’ listening comprehension This study is divided into five chapters: introduction, literature review, methodology, findings, and results and discussion In the last section, in particular, we points out the study’s strengths and limitations, and makes several suggestions 1.2 Research title DH14TA-Lê Huỳnh Diễm Xương-Trần Thị Diệu Minh Therefore, in this thesis, I would like to focus my research on the topic: “The effects of repeated listening on junior English majors’ listening comprehension at AGU” With this title, some main reasons and purposes for our research would be listed out as in the next section “Rational” 1.3 Rationale Although English is more and more concentrated in Vietnamese educational system, just few Vietnamese students can be successful in learning English, even English majored ones Like at many other schools and universities in Vietnam, the majority of An Giang University English majors are not really good at English, specially listening skill, even after graduation Those students cannot communicate in English effectively and confidently inasmuch as their listening skill is not good enough to be able to understand what the others mean Realizing the seriousness of this problem, there have been researches galore into listening skill development carried out by AGU teachers and students Of these studies, however, there have been just few researchers noticing to the roles of repeated listening on improving listening comprehension As a result, a survey on “The effects of repeated listening on junior English majors’ listening comprehension at AGU” is conducted to give practical contribution to the teaching and learning of English, particularly at AGU To be more detailed, this study is expected to improve English listening ability for AGU students which results them in communicating in English effectively by repeated listening method For other researchers who conduct the same study, the result of this study is expected to be a reference and contribute more information to solve the same problems 1.4 Research questions: This study is conducted based on the following research questions: DH14TA-Lê Huỳnh Diễm Xương-Trần Thị Diệu Minh (1) What is the reality of applying repeated listening approach of junior English majors at AGU? (2) What are the effects of repeated listening on junior English majors’ listening comprehension at AGU? 1.5 The aims of the study The purpose of this study is to find out the effects of repeated listening on junior English majors’ listening comprehension at AGU and enhance English majors’ listening ability As a result, the aims of this study are: (1) To investigate the reality of applying repeated listening approach of junior English majored students at AGU (2) To examine the effects of repeated listening on English listening comprehension 1.6 Research methodology 1.6.1 Research design There are several kinds of research designs such as descriptive design, experimental design, evaluation design, etc Each will have different strengths and weaknesses Therefore, we will depend on the features and contents of questions, study conditions such as time and financial ability to apply an appropriate research design In this study, “the descriptive design” is applied to draw a general picture about the reality of applying repeated listening approach of junior English majors at AGU It is also used to re-describe the effects of listening repetition on those English majors’ listening comprehension at AGU, which is to improve listening ability of AGU students Firstly, a survey questionnaire will be delivered to 50 DH14TA students to investigate the reality of applying repeated listening on junior English majors’ listening comprehension and its effects on junior English majors’ listening comprehension at AGU The information from questionnaire will be analyzed to embrace the reality of learning listening skills at AGU and find out an effective solution which can be “repeated listening” to enhance the students’ listening comprehension Then, an interview is also conducted to a group of students with similar contents above in order to raise the reliability 1.6.2 Population DH14TA-Lê Huỳnh Diễm Xương-Trần Thị Diệu Minh In this research, the English majored students are the objects of the study At present, faculty of foreign languages has over 800 students in total including pedagogy and bachelor There are approximately 800 English students at AGU divided into different majors: AV, TA and CD AV, TA and CD majors, in detailed, usually take about 200, 200 and 400 students respectively Interaction books (to freshmen) and English language skills for IELTS books (to second, third and fourth year students) are applied to primarily develop four main skills - listening, speaking, writing and reading- in their curriculum Like the three left, the total units of listening subjects which must be completed are 12 to university students, and to college ones before their graduation 1.6.3 Sample Due to the limitation of time, research competence and finance, in this study, we only pick up 50 students from DH14TA and DH14AV for surveying the effects of repeated listening on junior English majors’ listening comprehension at AGU These participants are chosen to be our sample because they have just been taught enough the number of units of listening skills and observed teachers’ listening teaching methods during terms of studying listening subjects Hence, they are selected to be participants in this survey 1.6.4 Data collection instruments Questionnaires A questionnaire is a research instrument consisting of a series of questions and other prompts for the purpose of gathering information from respondents Although it is often designed for statistical analysis of the responses, this is not always the case The questionnaire was invented by the Statistical Society of London in 1838 To collect the sufficient data needed for this study, a questionnaire consisting of 18 questions is designed for 50 students ( 25 from DH14TA and 25 from DH14AV) to get information about the reality of applying repeated listening approach of those students and find out its effects on the students’ listening comprehension at AG DH14TA-Lê Huỳnh Diễm Xương-Trần Thị Diệu Minh During the time questionnaire was set up, it underwent a lot of changes Right after the first drafts had been finished, it was delivered to these 50 students as the pilot stage The pilot data was used to check for the reliability first Then the carefully edited questionnaire would be delivered to these ones to exploit their levels of agreement to each statement relating to the reality of applying repeated listening of junior English majors and the effects of listening repetition on junior English majors’ listening comprehension at AGU Before using the questionnaire for the main scheme it was read and evaluated by teacher To ensure the reliability of students’ responses, the research gave clear instructions to the job The questionnaire consists of three parts with 18 questions: (1) questions for participant’s background (2) questions for the reality of applying repeated listening of junior English majors (3) questions for the effects of listening repetition on junior English majors’ listening comprehension at AGU Interview Beside the questionnaire, to make sure the reliability of data collected in this research, an interview checklist consisting of 14 questions was designed to exploit students’ feedbacks from the reality and effects of repeated listening approach on junior English majored students’ listening comprehension at AGU The subjects of the interview were students selected among 50 students in the sample They are students who apply and follow repeated listening approach to improve their listening comprehension When being interviewed, five students would answer 14 questions in the interview checklist about background information, the reality and the effects of applying repeated listening on junior English majors’ listening comprehension at AGU and their answers would be carefully written 1.7 Structure of the thesis This thesis consists of five chapters Chapter one introduces general information of the research Chapter two reviews the literature and chapter three discusses DH14TA-Lê Huỳnh Diễm Xương-Trần Thị Diệu Minh research methodology Findings are presented in chapter four Chapter five gives the summary of the study, conclusion, implications and suggestions for further study LITERATURE REVIEW 2.1 Introduction Literature review is a base of the research In this study, literature is built with two parts The first part is definition and clarifying of key terms including repeated listening, listening comprehension In the second part, it is background of the study It concludes related studies of repeated listening and listening comprehension 2.2 Definition of key terms 2.2.1 What is repeated listening? Repeated listening is when a learner listens to the same recording repeatedly In repeated listening, learners collect several brief tape-recordings of proficient speakers discussing a topic selected by the acquirer They then listen to the tape as many times as they like, at their leisure Repeated listening, interests in the topic, and familiar context help make the input comprehensible Topics are gradually changed, which allows the learners to expand their competence comfortably Repeated listening is a low-tech, inexpensive, and pleasant way to obtain comprehensible input Necessary tools for applying repeated listening In order to best utilize repeated listening, a few tools of the trade are needed: + “Ipod or MP3 player” for storing audio files + “Google Translate” for finding listening materials + “Audio Hijack” for recording any audio from the Internet that isn’t downloadable + Time to search, collect, and listen Tips for repeated listening DH14TA-Lê Huỳnh Diễm Xương-Trần Thị Diệu Minh + First of all, let’s choose short English audios – from to minutes – which you are interested in the topics Repeated listening should only be on topics that are of real interest, to ensure that the focus is on the message Boredom sets in rapidly when listening is undertaken only because it is in another language + After listening to the recording for several times, if you still not really understand some passage of it, you should read the transcripts to make it clearer and more familiar This will make the foreign language input more comprehensible + Listen repeatedly until you understand all about the audio/ tape or interest starts to wane + Topics then are changed gradually and you move to related topics This will help ensure greater comprehensibility of input One might move, for example, from current events to history Repeated listening ’s theoretical foundations Repeated listening is based on research findings on the receptive skills: listening and reading It is based on the concept of extensive listening (listening in great amounts and for content) and the principles of repetition, authenticity, listening for information, and topic familiarity In the repeated listening approach presented here, comprehension is enhanced because subjects can listen to the same input several times Repetitive exposure to a listening passage has been found to be a very effective means for improving listening comprehension Studies that have pointed out the value of repetitive exposure to language input are Blankenship, 1982; Pica, 1987; Lund, 1991; Cervantes and Gainer, 1992; Chiang and Dunkel, 1992; Terrell, 1993; Berne, 1995; Bygate, 1999; Krashen, 1996; and Gass, Mackey, AlvarezTorres, and Fernández, 1999 From a pedagogical point of view, Chambers (1996) points out that the repetition technique reduces the students’ level of anxiety because the listener knows that he/she can listen to the segment as many times as desired Moreover, subjects studied by Rodrigo and Krashen (1996) reported that, when rehearing a single listening passage several times, the speakers on the tape seemed DH14TA-Lê Huỳnh Diễm Xương-Trần Thị Diệu Minh to the listeners to be speaking more slowly, when in fact they, the students, were listening to the same, unaltered passage They also appeared to distinguish sound sequences more efficiently into more and more meaningful words and chunks/phrases, thereby improving their level of comprehension with each rehearing Repeated listening also requires authentic listening material, which, as with all authentic texts, focuses on culture as a natural informational context facilitating the language acquisition process The benefits are numerous Authentic material provides adult learners with an opportunity to work at a higher cognitive level (Byrnes, 1984 and Swaffar, Arens, and Byrnes, 1991) and, consequently, to develop target language skills in a more meaningful context Authentic material, thus, leads to more effective listening skills and to cultural awareness The use of authentic listening material, and hence of spontaneous speech by native speakers, has been recommended by several researchers (Meyer, 1984; Liskin-Gasparro and Veguez, 1990; Lund, 1991; Herron and Seay, 1991; Bacon, 1992; Harlow and Muyskens, 1994; and Schmidt-Rinehart, 1994; Omaggio, 2000) Similarly, topic familiarity has been shown to aid listening comprehension by allowing language learners to more accurately predict the unknown content of a passage as they establish links between what is familiar, i.e background knowledge, and what is new Several researchers report that topic familiarity has a positive effect on listening skills (Gass and Varonis, 1984; Glisan, 1988; Altman, 1990; Lund, 1991; Chiang and Dunkel, 1992; Dunkel, 1986; Schmidt-Rinehart, 1994; Bygate, 1999; and Gass, Mackey, Alvarez-Torres, and Fernandez, 1999) Finally, if a language teacher has succeeded in helping his or her students to focus on meaning and information, (i.e listening for content, extensively and allowing for the possibility of not completely understanding every single word in the recorded passage), they will not be concerned about form, and consequently, they will be more likely to apply top-down strategies, as used by effective listeners For a more detailed account of the benefits of a focus on information and general meaning in DH14TA-Lê Huỳnh Diễm Xương-Trần Thị Diệu Minh language acquisition see Cook, Dupuy and Tse (1994), Day and Bamford (2000), and Krashen (2003, 1993) 2.2.2 What is listening comprehension? Definition of listening Listening can be defined as, “Listening is the act of hearing attentively” It is also a process similar to reading which should possess knowledge of phonology, syntax, semantics and text understanding Thomlison (1984) defines listening as, “Active listening, which is very important for effective communication” or “More than just hearing and to understand and interpret the meaning of a conversation” Listening is receiving language through the ears It involves identifying the sounds of speech and processing them into words and sentences When we listen, we use our ears to receive individual sounds (letters, stress, rhythm and pauses) and we use our brain to convert these into messages that mean something to us Listening in any language requires focus and attention It is a skill that some people need to work at harder than others People who have difficulty concentrating are typically poor listeners Listening in a second language requires even greater focus Like babies, we learn this skill by listening to people who already know how to speak the language Types of listening † Discriminative listening Discriminative listening is the most basic type of listening, whereby the difference between difference sounds is identified If you cannot hear differences, then you cannot make sense of the meaning that is expressed by such differences We learn to discriminate between sounds within our own language early, and later are unable to discriminate between the phonemes of other languages This is one reason why a person from one country finds it difficult to speak another language perfectly, as they are unable distinguish the subtle sounds that are required in that language Likewise, a person who cannot hear the subtleties of emotional variation in another person's voice will be less likely to be able to discern the emotions the other person DH14TA-Lê Huỳnh Diễm Xương-Trần Thị Diệu Minh is experiencing Listening is a visual as well as auditory act, as we communicate much through body language We thus also need to be able to discriminate between muscle and skeletal movements that signify different meanings † Comprehension listening The next step beyond discriminating between different sound and sights is to make sense of them To comprehend the meaning requires first having a lexicon of words at our fingertips and also all rules of grammar and syntax by which we can understand what others are saying the same is true, of course, for the visual components of communication, and an understanding of body language helps us understand what the other person is really meaning In communication, some words are more important and some less so, and comprehension often benefits from extraction of key facts and items from a long spiel Comprehension listening is also known as content listening, informative listening and full listening † Critical listening Critical listening is listening in order to evaluate and judge, forming opinion about what is being said Judgment includes assessing strengths and weaknesses, agreement and approval This form of listening requires significant real-time cognitive effort as the listener analyzes what is being said, relating it to existing knowledge and rules, whilst simultaneously listening to the ongoing words from the speaker † Biased listening Biased listening happens when the person hears only what they want to hear, typically misinterpreting what the other person says based on the stereotypes and other biases that they have Such biased listening is often very evaluative in nature † Evaluative listening In evaluative listening, or critical listening, we make judgments about what the other person is saying We seek to assess the truth of what is being said We also DH14TA-Lê Huỳnh Diễm Xương-Trần Thị Diệu Minh that these skills should form the focus of teaching" is not enough and adds that listening examination is not exclusively for comprehension but also for language learning itself (1) Jack C Richards' view shows the importance of what really should be taught and the aims of teaching should not be exclusive only on making students understand for a moment Students' understanding should cover the possible learning progression Although these definitions vary to some extent, basically listening is considered as an activity in which listeners employ a variety of processes in trying to comprehend information from oral texts In this way, listeners construct meaning from the passage and relate what they hear to their existing knowledge Additionally, it is meaningful to consider listening comprehension as a three stage process The process of listening comprehension The process of listening comprehension once thought to be a passive activity is now generally described as a dynamic interpretive process consisting of a series of complex interactive processing stages that a listener goes through (Call, 1985; Murphy, 1991; O’Malley, Chamot & Kupper, 1989; Richards, 1983; Rost, 1990) As mentioned there are many interpretations of these processes and different authors make their own distinctions in gradation and the rank order in which some processes occur It is not possible to explore all the arguments since the concern here is with how a teacher might approach the teaching of listening to assist learners with problems In order to find where these problem areas have been placed in the processing chain, it is useful to examine a few examples taken from the literature Richards defines three related levels of processing which he terms ‘propositional identification’, ‘interpretation of illocutionary force’ and ‘activation of real world knowledge’ (1983:220) Lund lists six ‘listener functions’ of which ‘identification’ is the first and is defined as ‘focus on the code rather than the message’ (1990:107) Dunkel et al divide the listening comprehension construct into three areas The first area consists of processes which precede comprehension such as orientation, attention, perception and recognition These they term as being DH14TA-Lê Huỳnh Diễm Xương-Trần Thị Diệu Minh ‘lower order, ‘bottom up’, ‘trivial pre cursor’ elements (1993:180) Comprehension occupies the middle ground and the ‘higher order’, ‘top down’ elements including, for example, analysis, synthesis or evaluation corresponding to Richards‘ activation of world knowledge’ The problems of perception, recognition, and identification are described as being ‘lower order’ processes Upon such examination it becomes obvious that the problems mentioned fall mainly into the ‘bottom up’ category of processing Learners’ problems in listening comprehension EFL Learners regularly report persistent problems in coping with spoken English which include problems with recognition of sounds (Carrier, 1999; Rost, 1990) and their functions (Brazil, 1994a) in fast speech, problems of anxiety from a lack of understanding of the systematics of the acoustic signal (Brazil, 1994a; Norris, 1993) and problems concerning how to approach the task of decoding spoken English (Brown, G., 1990; Carrier, 1999; Chien & Wei, 1998) There are complaints about ‘speed’ which are related to difficulties in understanding reduced forms, distinguishing word boundaries and recognition of non-prominent words (Cauldwell, 1996) Temporal concerns are also related to processing and short term memory capacity as well (Call, 1985; Ellis, 1996; Rost, 1990) There is a need for teachers to provide a focus on listening to promote acquisition in general and to relieve the frustrations and anxiety learners may feel in coping with the stream of speech In order to this in a principled way, it is incumbent on teachers to be aware of what current theory has to offer in this area Unfortunately this may not always be something teachers Two thirds of the teachers in Berne’s study (1998) reported ‘never’ or ‘rarely’ when asked how often they sought out current listening comprehension research Valuable insights from research may be ignored or dismissed if teachers feel threatened by such materials (Carter, 1998) Literature on listening comprehension may appear to be extremely complex and even chaotic and thus threatening from the perspective of a non-specialist such as an ordinary language teacher DH14TA-Lê Huỳnh Diễm Xương-Trần Thị Diệu Minh Models of listening process In terms of language processing, it is now generally accepted that learners need access to both top-down and bottom-up processing strategies Bottom-up processing strategies focus learners on the individual components of spoken messages, that is, the phonemes, individual words and grammatical elements which need to be comprehended in order to understand the messages Top-down processing strategies, on the other hand, focus learners on macro-features of text such as the speaker’s purpose, and the topic of the message (Nunan, 1998) It was noted by Richards (1990) that an understanding of the role of bottom-up and topdown processes in listening is central to any theory of listening comprehension It is, of course, clear that we cannot see and observe the cognitive process of listening However, understanding the listening process can help us to rethink the methods of teaching listening For this purpose, there are three key components for clarifying the listening process: bottom- up, top-down and interactive processes † Bottom-up processing Morley (1991) maintained that bottom-up processing of language information is evoked by an external source, that is, by the incoming language data itself Bottomup comprehension of speech, then, refers to the part of the process in which the understanding of incoming language is worked out from converting sounds into words, into lexical meaning and grammatical relationships and so on to an understanding of the meaning of the message Thus, the meaning of a message is based on the incoming language data Moreover, Buck (2001) suggested that in bottom-up processing, the process takes place in a definite order, starting with the lowest level of detail and moving up to the highest level That is, the input is first decoded into phonemes which are used to identify individual words Then the syntactic level continues processing on to the next higher stage followed by an analysis of the semantics to arrive at a literal understanding of the basic linguistic meaning Finally, the listener interprets the literal meaning in terms of the communicative situation to understand what the speaker means Nunan (1998) DH14TA-Lê Huỳnh Diễm Xương-Trần Thị Diệu Minh remarked that the characteristics of the bottom-up approach focus learners on the individual components of spoken messages that is the phonemes, individual words and grammatical elements which need to be comprehended in order to understand the message A similar view was proposed by Carrel (1988), who indicated that listeners construct meaning from the smallest units of letters and words to larger ones like phrases, clauses, sentences, and paragraphs According to the bottom-up model, the meaning of the message is thus based on the incoming language data combined with linguistic knowledge of different types including phonology, lexis, syntax, semantics and discourse structure This is why some scholars (Carrell, 1988 and Brown, 2001) described this model as text-based and data driven processing Accordingly, bottom-up processing of language information, or text-based processing refers to the use of incoming data as a source of information about the meaning of a message Examples of bottom-up processing in listening viewed as a process of decoding include the following: (1) Scanning the input to identify familiar lexical items (2) Segmenting the stream of speech into constituents – for example, in order to recognize that “a-book-of-mine” consists of four words (3) Using phonological cues to identify the information focus in an utterance (4) Using grammatical cues to organize the input into constituents – for example, in order to recognize that in “the book which I lent you” “the book” and “which I lent you” are the major constituents rather than “the book which I” and “lent you” (Richards, 1990) The listener’s lexical and grammatical competence in a language provides the basis for bottom-up processing A person’s lexical competence serves as a mental dictionary to which incoming words are referred for meaning assignment Grammatical competence, thus, can be seen as a set of strategies that are applied to the analysis of incoming data † Top-down processing Chaudron and Richards (1986) noted that top-down processing involves prediction and inference on the basis of facts, propositions and expectations That is it is quite DH14TA-Lê Huỳnh Diễm Xương-Trần Thị Diệu Minh possible to understand the meaning of a word before decoding its sounds because we have different types of knowledge, including knowledge of the world This idea comes from real life situations in which we know what normally happens, and so we have expectations in mind about what we will hear Top-down processing, then, comes from an internal source evoked from prior knowledge and global expectations These include expectations about language and expectations about the world Background knowledge may take several forms: previous knowledge about the topic of discourse, situational or contextual knowledge, and knowledge stored in long- term memory in the form of “schemata” and “scripts” (Richards, 1990) The term ‘schema’ is defined in Rumelhart (1980) as a data structure for representing generic concepts stored in memory Carrell and Eisterhold (1983) additionally pointed out that background information in the listener’s mind is of two kinds: content schemata and formal schemata Content schemata include cultural knowledge, topic familiarity, and previous experiences Formal schemata, on the other hand, involve people’s knowledge of discourse forms: text types, rhetorical conventions, and the structural organization of prose Both content and formal schemata facilitate the listeners’ comprehension of text Clearly, schemata or scripts are closely related to top-down processing in listening comprehension According to Buck (2001), top-down processing utilizes various types of knowledge involved in understanding language and these are not applied in any fixed order In fact, they can be used in any order or the application of the different types of knowledge used in processing may occur simultaneously For example, syntactic knowledge might be used to help identify a word, or idea about the topic of conversation Knowledge of the context will also help interpret the meaning In the same vein, Anderson and Lynch (1988) posited that meaning does not reside exclusively within the words It also exists in the head of the listener Successful listeners are those who can make use of both the knowledge inside and outside their heads to interpret what they hear Therefore, the use of knowledge inside the head is the use of knowledge which is not directly encoded in words This topdown view of listening is also known as knowledge-based processing DH14TA-Lê Huỳnh Diễm Xương-Trần Thị Diệu Minh Examples of top-down processing in listening which make use of background knowledge in understanding the meaning of a message include: (1) Assigning an interaction to part of a particular event, such as storytelling, telling a joke, praying, and complaining (2) Assigning places, persons, or things to categories (3) Inferring cause and effect relationships (4) Anticipating outcomes (5) Inferring the topic of a discourse (6) Inferring the sequence between events (7) Inferring missing details (Richards, 1990) † Interactive processing An extension of the ideas of bottom-up and top-down processing is the view that listening comprehension actually involves interactive processing That is, listening comprehension is a combination of bottom-up and top-down processing It was suggested by Richards (1990) that in accounting for the nature of processing spoken language, bottom-up and top-down modes work together in a cooperative process O’Malley, et al (1989) also found that effective second language listeners used both top-down and bottom-up strategies to construct meaning while ineffective listeners try to decode the meanings of individual words The point is simply that listening comprehension is the result of an interaction between a numbers of pieces of knowledge To comprehend spoken language, listeners have to use many types of knowledge The knowledge of individual linguistic units such as phonemes, words, or grammatical structures, and the role of the listener’s expectation, the situation, background knowledge, and the topic are all important for listeners to be able to understand speech In other words, listeners use whatever information they have to interpret what the speaker is saying DH14TA-Lê Huỳnh Diễm Xương-Trần Thị Diệu Minh Studies have been carried out to specify the types of processing skilled, listeners mostly rely on It was found that skilled listeners are better able to use top- down, or knowledge based processes whereas less-skilled listeners tend to rely on bottomup, or text-based processes Hildyard and Olson (1982, cited in Rubin, 1994), for example, studying the comprehension and memory of oral versus written discourse, found that skilled listeners use a knowledge-based mode of text processing whereas less-skilled listeners attend mostly to local details Similarly, Shohamy and Inbar (1991), in a study of the effect of text and question type on listening comprehension, found that less-skilled listeners performed much better on ‘local questions’ which required the listener to identify details and facts, than on ‘global questions’ which required the listener to synthesize information, draw conclusions and make inferences They, therefore, concluded that while high level listeners seemed to process the text in a knowledge-based manner, the low level listeners seemed to process the text in a data-driven manner Some studies, however, have indicated that skilled listeners are those who are able to monitor their developing interpretation of the incoming text by constantly checking it against the incoming linguistic cues and to modify their interpretation accordingly For example, Buck (1990) stated that listeners must check and monitor their developing interpretation in the light of the linguistic input and their background knowledge to ensure that the interpretation is a reasonable one Buck maintained that the ability to adjust the interpretation in response to new information is obviously an important listening skill Moreover, Richards (1990) pointed out that good listeners use a number of processes simultaneously to reach an understanding of incoming speech In brief, in listening comprehension, bottom-up and top-down processing are corelated in a complex relationship and both are used to interpret meaning To arrive at an understanding of the message, listeners must understand the phonetic input, vocabulary, and syntax (bottom-up processing), and at the same time, use the context of situations, general knowledge, and past experiences (top-down processing) That is, to construct the meaning, listeners are not passively listening DH14TA-Lê Huỳnh Diễm Xương-Trần Thị Diệu Minh to speakers but are actively reconstructing the speakers’ intended meaning and getting meaningful information by decoding the sounds, words, and phrases 2.3 Related studies 2.3.1 Related research on listening comprehension As teachers and scholars grow to understand the unique characteristics of listening skill and the significant role it plays in language learning and communication, they recognize more and more the importance of teaching listening comprehension in the second language classroom This recognition has resulted in an increase in the number of listening activities in student textbooks and even in methodology texts designed specifically for listening There is, however, only a small body of research on listening comprehension since it is difficult to gain direct access to the listening process (Yian, 1998) Two of researches in listening comprehension were about listener characteristics and process characteristics Listener characteristics Listener characteristics appear to have considerable impact on an individual’s listening comprehension Among these characteristics are: language proficiency level, memory, age, gender, and background knowledge First, language proficiency level is a major variable in almost all of the studies A major problem in comparing studies is that there are few standardized tests to determine proficiency level Most studies use either teacher judgment, course level, or a performance on a nonstandard test Most researchers suggested that cognitive processing varies depending on the learners’ knowledge of the language It is not clear what role grammar, vocabulary, background knowledge of the culture, or knowledge of discourse processes play at different proficiency levels However, the use of standardized listening proficiency tests such as those of the American Council of the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL) and The Interagency Language Roundtable (ILR) is working towards a standard to be used in listening comprehension researches (Rubin, 1994) It is clear that language proficiency is a variable that needs to be considered in every study DH14TA-Lê Huỳnh Diễm Xương-Trần Thị Diệu Minh Second, the relationship between memory and listening comprehension is complex Call (1985) considered whether listening comprehension was related to short-term memory for five types of auditory input: sentences in context, isolated sentences, random words, random digits, and musical tones She found that listening comprehension was correlated with these five types in the following order: isolated sentences, sentences in context, musical tones, random words, and random digits Also, Dunkel et al (1989) considered the influence of short-term memory on encoding lecture material in English They studied students taking college freshman English classes The students were native and non-native speakers who were presumably at an advanced level in English They found that subjects who had high short-term memory correctly recognized more concept information and detail information than subjects who had low short-term memory Moreover, they found that native speakers recognized significantly more of the lecture concepts and detail than did non-native speakers of English In addition, Conrad (1989, cited in Rubin, 1994) compared the memory of non-native speakers at high and medium-skill levels for recorded sentence at different speaking rates She found that non-native speakers tended to ignore information in the middle of sentences Rather, they tried to duplicate the beginnings or ends of sentences Third, age is an important variable affecting second language achievement Seright (1985) considered the relationship between age and L2 achievement of adults in an instructional setting Working with members of the Canadian Armed Forces undergoing English language training in Quebec, she used 71 learners who ranged in age from 17 – 41 years of age with a mean age of 22.76 years Seright divided the students into two groups: an older group (aged 25 to 41) and a younger group (aged 17 to 24) Both groups were compared with respect to short-term development in aural comprehension She found that the mean gain was significantly greater for younger subjects than for older subjects Her study suggested that in adult L2 learners, the rate of achievement in aural comprehension decreases with increasing age DH14TA-Lê Huỳnh Diễm Xương-Trần Thị Diệu Minh Fourth, only a few studies have examined gender in listening skill Some studies have considered how gender may relate to differences in listening comprehension For example, Boyle (1987) used Chinese students of English between 18 – 20 years old in his research Using a battery of tests including a vocabulary recall, a listening passage, a listening conversation, two dictations, vocabulary identifications given orally, as well as other items not related directly to listening, he found that males did significantly better on two tests of listening vocabulary, and woman did significantly better on all other tests However, some studies could not find a significant relationship between gender and listening comprehension For instance, Feyten (1991) looked at university students of French and Spanish She found that L1 listening ability was significantly related to foreign language listening comprehension However, she failed to find a significant relationship between gender and any foreign language proficiency measure Bacon (1992) looked at university students of Spanish and also failed to find a significant relationship between gender and listening comprehension Similarly, Markham found no significant differences between men and woman ESL students in their level of comprehension though all listeners paid more attention to male speakers than to female speakers Markham concluded that male speakers were prejudged by listeners to be more expert than female speakers Fifth, several studies have considered the role of background knowledge in listening comprehension Long (1990, cited in Rubin, 1994) considered whether Spanish FL listeners comprehend better when they possess schemata relevant to the listening topic The subjects were students enrolled in a third quarter university Spanish course Before beginning the experiment, the students completed a survey of their background of the two subjects used namely “gold rushes” and “rock groups” Two measures of comprehension were used: a recall protocol and a recognition test consisting of paraphrased statements in English about the texts According to the survey results, students possessed less information about gold rushes than about rock groups Long found that recall protocols for the rock passage revealed a significantly higher number of correct DH14TA-Lê Huỳnh Diễm Xương-Trần Thị Diệu Minh idea units than the protocol for the gold rush passage This suggested that background knowledge may be related to listening comprehension Schmidt-Rinehart (1992, cited in Rubin, 1994) also considered how topic familiarity and proficiency level affect recall measures of listening comprehension Students from three sections of first, second and third quarter university Spanish classes listened to two passages, one about a familiar topic and another about a novel topic Comprehension was assessed through a recall protocol Results showed that both topic familiarity and course level affect measures of listening comprehension All subjects recalled significantly more information from the familiar topic and the improvement in comprehension scores ascended with the quarter level Finally, Chiang and Dunkel (1992) studied male undergraduate students at an intermediate level of English at the Chinese Naval Academy in the Republic of China They used a 650 - word lecture on “the Amish people and the Pennsylvania Dutch Country” (a topic considered unfamiliar to students) and a 68word lecture on “Confucius and Confucianism” (a topic considered familiar to students) They found that the students gained significantly higher scores on the familiar text than the unfamiliar text In all studies, background knowledge is shown to enhance listening comprehension Process characteristics The process of listening is probably more difficult to research than the other four factors because processes consist of internal operations which are not easy to measure directly Processes refer to how listeners interpret input in terms of what they know or identify what they not know and are classified as either top-down or bottom-up processing Process also refers to the way in which listeners use different kinds of signals to interpret what is said, and this is known as listening strategies First, there is an ongoing discussion in L2 research as to whether listeners use their knowledge of the world, situations, and roles of human interaction to focus on meaning (top-down) and then use their knowledge of words, syntax, and grammar DH14TA-Lê Huỳnh Diễm Xương-Trần Thị Diệu Minh to work on form (bottom-up) or vice versa, and how these two interact Wolf (1987, cited in Rubin, 1994) worked with 12-18 year old German students of English Their proficiency level was beginning to low intermediate Wolf found that while students appeared to make use of both bottom-up and top-down processes with an easy text, they used more top-down processing strategies for the more difficult texts In contrast, Bacon (1992) found that students in a Spanish course used more top-down strategies with the more familiar passages She suggested that listeners employed more bottom-up strategies on more difficult input Moreover, Hildyard and Olson (1982, cited in Rubin, 1994) found that skilled listeners use a knowledge –based interactive mode of text processing whereas less-skilled listeners attend mostly to local details Shohamy and Inbar (1991) concluded that while high level listeners seemed to process the text in a knowledge-based manner, the low level test takers seemed to process the text in a data-driven manner It could be noted that skilled listeners are better able to use top- down or knowledge-based processes whereas less skilled listeners tend to rely on bottom-up or text-based processes Second, there have been a number of studies involving the investigation of listening comprehension strategies used by L2 learners With regard to ESL listening, Conrad (1985, cited in Rubin, 1994) found that as L2 listeners increased in proficiency level they relied more on contextual semantic cues than on syntactic or phonological cues Murphy (1985, cited in Rubin, 1994) indicated that more proficient listeners tended to have an open and flexible use of strategies, while less proficient listeners most frequently depend on the text and a consistent use of paraphrase O’Malley et al (1989) found that effective listeners used more self-monitoring, elaboration, and inference As for the study of EFL listening comprehension strategies, Rost and Ross (1991) used EFL students at three different colleges in Japan The results showed that beginning listeners had a persistent pattern of asking for repetition, rephrasing or simplification, whereas more advanced listeners asked questions using information already given in the story and used backchannel communication Huang and Naerssen (1987, cited in Teng, 1998) examined the learning strategies in oral communication used by EFL learners in China They found that functional DH14TA-Lê Huỳnh Diễm Xương-Trần Thị Diệu Minh practice was the strategy that distinguished successful Chinese EFL learners from less successful students, and successful learners more often employed a strategy of willingness to take risks The following studies all looked at Chinese students in Taiwan First, Chang et al (1995, cited in Teng, 1998) found that more subjects used a top-down approach than a bottom-up approach in EFL listening comprehension but found no difference in learner strategies between listening in a classroom situation and in a natural situation Moreover, good listeners and poor listeners were similar in terms of listening strategies Next, Katchen (1996, cited in Teng, 1998) asked subjects to summarize their weekly self-selected listening activities and comment on their listening skills Results indicated that students made exciting discoveries about their own listening strategies and more easily observed various listening comprehension factors Then, Lee (1997, cited in Teng, 1998) showed that the four EFL listening comprehension strategies most often used by subjects included asking speakers for repetition or paraphrasing, trying to understand each word, self-questioning for comprehension, and checking comprehension Finally, Teng (1998) investigated the EFL listening comprehension strategies used by college students in Taiwan, using as subjects, 51 freshmen students from the National Yunlin University of Science and Technology who first received a listening test with 20 multiple choice questions, and then completed a questionnaire about listening comprehension strategies The results indicated that among the six strategy categories ‘compensation’ was that most often employed by subjects, ‘cognitive’ was the next, and ‘affective’ was the least often used Besides, among the whole 52 strategies, ‘paying attention’ and ‘translating’ were the individual strategies with the highest frequent use Moreover, effective listeners used significantly more strategies than ineffective listeners in five of the six categories 2.3.2 Related research on repeated listening Common classroom listening activities have usually taken place in the form of extensive listening, the majority of teachers and students have not paid much attention to the role of repeated listening on listening comprehension In 1996, DH14TA-Lê Huỳnh Diễm Xương-Trần Thị Diệu Minh however, Krashen found the great value of this method Krashen defined repeated listening as listening to a piece of authentic listening material about 2-3 minutes long over and over again until the listeners gained adequate comprehension Krashen discovered the value of repeated listening through his own experience of Spanish learning He found that his Spanish listening ability had improved through repeated listening Therefore, he recommended that repeated listening be used in classrooms According to Krashen, repeated listening will be most valuable to second language learners who find uncontrolled casual conversation too difficult to understand Krashen suggested that repeated listening might be beneficial based on his personal experience In 1999, Dupuy did an empirical study to test the effectiveness of repeated listening The subjects of the study were 255 students learning French at a public university in the USA Dupuy found that an overwhelming majority of students, both at the beginning (first and second semester) and intermediate (third and fourth semester) level, reported finding repeated listening helpful in improving their language learning Students who found repeated listening helpful reported that it was most helpful for first improving listening comprehension, second fluency, and third developing vocabulary In addition, students at all levels made significant comprehension gains (20% or more) between the first and last listening So far, little research has been done on repeated listening (repeated listening) Krashen and Dupuy’s findings suggested that repeated listening could increase second language learners’ listening comprehension It was discovered that when a student listened to a passage for the first time, he or she had to engage in perception, parsing, and utilization to comprehend the continuous audio input However, some students, especially students with lower proficiency in the second language, would be doing mostly perception and parsing, and hardly reach the stage of utilization as they listened to a second language Repeated listening could help listeners pass beyond the phases of perception and parsing, and engage in more parsing and utilization Once students had heard the same text more than one time, they were familiar with some parts of the text In other words, DH14TA-Lê Huỳnh Diễm Xương-Trần Thị Diệu Minh comprehending some of the audio input became automatic They would then be able to spare energy and attention to relate what they had heard to their background knowledge and process the information in a deeper way (utilization) To be more specific, after the participants had listened to a text once, they were likely to know which parts they had already understood and which parts they had not still understood As they listened to the same text the following times, they were likely to plan to listen for parts they had not understood yet Furthermore, after listening to the text several times, some parts of the text would become automatic, so the listeners might begin to pay attention to and attempt to guess the meanings of unfamiliar words This promoted them to engage in inference and then with better understanding of the text after listening several times the participants were more likely to succeed in their attempts of inference After this process of repeated listening, participants could achieve better comprehension (Krashen, 1996; Dupuy, 1999) [...]... knowledge of the language, but nonlinguistic cues or knowledge of the world also have to be considered in the comprehension process Byrnes (1984), who defined listening as a complex skill in which people have to employ all types of knowledge to interpret the meaning, proposed another similar view of listening comprehension definition She explained that listening is more than the perception of sounds Rather,... their selection of what they are listening to This type of listening gives teachers to play their role even if they are so far from the students by advising students to listen, for example, to especial English accent more than other one Douglas Brown considered dictation as one of extensive listening tasks (132) For EFL teachers, dictation considers as a means for assessing listening comprehension because... Common classroom listening activities have usually taken place in the form of extensive listening, the majority of teachers and students have not paid much attention to the role of repeated listening on listening comprehension In 1996, DH14TA-Lê Huỳnh Diễm Xương-Trần Thị Diệu Minh however, Krashen found the great value of this method Krashen defined repeated listening as listening to a piece of. .. from the literature Richards defines three related levels of processing which he terms ‘propositional identification’, ‘interpretation of illocutionary force’ and ‘activation of real world knowledge’ (1983:220) Lund lists six ‘listener functions’ of which ‘identification’ is the first and is defined as ‘focus on the code rather than the message’ (1990:107) Dunkel et al divide the listening comprehension. .. understanding of the role of bottom-up and topdown processes in listening is central to any theory of listening comprehension It is, of course, clear that we cannot see and observe the cognitive process of listening However, understanding the listening process can help us to rethink the methods of teaching listening For this purpose, there are three key components for clarifying the listening process:... about the topic of conversation Knowledge of the context will also help interpret the meaning In the same vein, Anderson and Lynch (1988) posited that meaning does not reside exclusively within the words It also exists in the head of the listener Successful listeners are those who can make use of both the knowledge inside and outside their heads to interpret what they hear Therefore, the use of knowledge... to decode the meanings of individual words The point is simply that listening comprehension is the result of an interaction between a numbers of pieces of knowledge To comprehend spoken language, listeners have to use many types of knowledge The knowledge of individual linguistic units such as phonemes, words, or grammatical structures, and the role of the listener’s expectation, the situation, background... dictation' nature shows that students need a verity of lexical grammatical competences Definition of listening comprehension With the regard to the term listening comprehension in language learning, scholars have proposed a number of different definitions Chastain (1971), for example, defined listening comprehension as the ability to understand the speech of native speakers at normal speed in listening. .. processing of language information is evoked by an external source, that is, by the incoming language data itself Bottomup comprehension of speech, then, refers to the part of the process in which the understanding of incoming language is worked out from converting sounds into words, into lexical meaning and grammatical relationships and so on to an understanding of the meaning of the message Thus, the meaning... utilization to comprehend the continuous audio input However, some students, especially students with lower proficiency in the second language, would be doing mostly perception and parsing, and hardly reach the stage of utilization as they listened to a second language Repeated listening could help listeners pass beyond the phases of perception and parsing, and engage in more parsing and utilization Once