Premium
The Effect of Speech Modification, Prior Knowledge, and Listening Proficiency on EFL Lecture Learning
Author(s) -
CHIANG CHUNG SHING,
DUNKEL PATRICIA
Publication year - 1992
Publication title -
tesol quarterly
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.737
H-Index - 91
eISSN - 1545-7249
pISSN - 0039-8322
DOI - 10.2307/3587009
Subject(s) - active listening , psychology , listening comprehension , comprehension , test (biology) , linguistics , cognitive psychology , communication , philosophy , paleontology , biology
This study investigates the listening comprehension of 388 high‐intermediate listening proficiency (HILP) and low‐intermediate listening proficiency (LILP) Chinese students of English as a foreign language. These students listened to a lecture, the discourse of which was (a) familiar‐unmodified, (b) familiar‐modified, (c) unfamiliar‐unmodified, or (d) unfamiliar‐modified. The modified discourse contained information redundancies and elaborations. After the lecture, the EFL subjects took a multiple‐choice exam testing recognition of information presented in the lecture and general knowledge of the familiar (“Confucius and Confucianism”) and unfamiliar (“The Amish People”) topics. A significant interaction between speech modification (redundant vs. nonredundant speech) and listening proficiency (HILP vs. LILP) indicated that the HILP students benefited from speech modification, which entailed elaboration/redundancy of information, but the LILP students did not. A significant interaction between prior knowledge (familiar vs. unfamiliar topic) and test type (passage‐independent vs. passage‐dependent items) was also found. For both the HILP and LILP subjects, prior knowledge had a significant impact on subjects' memory for information contained in the passage‐independent test items on the postlecture comprehension test. Those EFL subjects who listened to the familiar‐topic lecture on Confucius had higher passage‐independent than passage‐dependent scores. There was no difference in the performance on the passage‐independent and passage‐dependent items of those who listened to the lecture on an unfamiliar topic (the Amish). However, the passage‐independent performance of subjects who listened to the familiar topic lecture was superior to that of those who listened to the lecture on the unfamiliar topic. Subjects' performance on passage‐dependent items did not differ significantly whether the familiar or unfamiliar topic was presented. Implications of the findings for assessing and teaching EFL listening comprehension are suggested.