Factors Affecting Listening prehension
Since listening is a plex active process in which learners decode and construct the meaning of a text by drawing on their previous knowledge about the world as well as their linguistic knowledge, there seem to be many factors that affect listening prehension. Two factors related to the present study, i. e., repetition and schema, are reviewed in this section.
Repetition
One purpose of this study is to investigate the effects of different listening tiime vs. three-time listening) on learners' listening coal vocabulary acquisition. Repetition is an i affect learners' ability to process the information in a listening task, for it provides g time and clarifies the relationship between the syntactic foronducted to date on the effect of repeated exposure has shown that repetition is also an important factor facilitating L2 listening prehension.
Lund (1991) exahe effects of repetition and different course levels (proficiency levels) on the listening and reading prehension in German as a foreign language of 60 university students in their first, second, and third semesters. He found listening prehension performance, as measured by propositions and lexical items recalled, id opportunity to listen to the passage. Results also indicated that this improvement was greater for third-sehan it was for learners in the first and second se, the improvement of the students' listening recall task in the first and second semesters was about half that of the third-semester students, whereas there was no difference in the iudents at different proficiency levels in the reading recall task. Therefore, he argued that the third-seed from the repeated exposure in the listening task. The iening perforounted for by what Lund called “recursive use of the texts”, which provides the learners with “a test structure of meaning to be fit to the text on the next repetition”.
To exahe effect of input ion) on listening prehension of Japanese university students, Cervantes and Gainer (1992) conducted two experiments involving about 80 English y in Japan that pared the effects of listening to simplified input once versus listening to a difficult text with or without repetition. Results of the study showed that both siion facilitated prehension than unmodified texts. The first experiment showed, unsurprisingly, that the simplified version was easier to understand than the cod experit difference was found between the group hearing the syntactically simplified version and the group hearing the plex version with repetition. Thus, Cervantes and Gainer argued that although syntactically sis prehension, it may not be necessary if other , such as repetition, is available.
Berne (1995) investigated the effect of multiple exposures to a video clip on prehension performance of 62 native English speakers learning Spanish in an Ay. Before viewing the video twice, the participants were randomly put into three groups with different pre-listening activities: a question preview activity, a vocabulary preview activity, and a filler activity. Results revealed that scores for all three groups itly as a result of viewing the passage a second time. The researcher thus concluded that “the most effective means of improving listening cohrough additional exposure to the passage” ().
Chang (1999) looked at learners' levels of prehension as the number of repetitions increased, and her results showed that the number of repetitions required for adequate coeners'proficiency level and the difficulty of the listening text. For high-proficiency level listeners, a single repetition was sufficient if the listening text was easy, but for low-proficiency level listeners, the improvement in their listening prehension was less noticeable even after several repetitions, particularly if the text was difficult or the listeners were unfa.
Chang and Read (2006) exahe effects of four different types of listening support (preview of the questions, repetition of the input, provision of topic knowledge, and vocabulary instruction) on the listening perforese learners of English at a college in Taiwan. They also investigated their interactional effects between types of listening support and listening perforh proficiency levels based on the results of the listening section of the Test of English for International Co (TOEIC). Results showed that the effects of the four listening support types differed aording to proficiency level. The high listening proficiency group outperformed the low listening proficiency group in the condition of repetition of the input, and for the high listening proficiency group, repetition of the input was more effective than any other instructional treatment. Based on these results, Chang and Read suggested that the high listening proficiency group would benefit more than the low listening proficiency group from repetition of the input.
Elkhafaifi (2005) studied the impact of pre-listening activities (vocabulary preview or questions preview) and repeated listening exposure on listening prehension scores of 111 intermediate AFL (Arabic as a foreign language) learners. The students watched a videotaped lecture twice and were tested on their coiching the video. Results showed that although vocabulary knowledge played a significant role in listening perfors prior to the listening also helped the students achieve significantly better listening scores, “multiple exposures to the listening passage served as the best predictor of listening proficiency” (). This led the author to conclude that “the single most important factor in iprehension is repeated exposure to the listening passage” ().
O'Bryan and Hegelheimer (2009) used a mixed-igate the use and awareness of four intermediate ESL students' listening strategies over the course of one semester at a large y in the United States. They also investigated the impact of repetition on listening strategies and on the developitive awareness. Four students, two undergraduates and two graduates, received an informal warion before listening to two passages, and a brief reminder of what they were supposed to do while listening. This was followed by a verbal report stage when they listened to the passages for the second time and voiced their thoughts. The researchers found a difference in the strategies used and level of prehension attained by the participants in the second listening, and thus claid listening allowed learners “to build up to plex bottog strategies, nad grammatical relationships to prehend the input and utilize the information gained from the text to make meaning. ”They argued that “having the opportunity to repeat the text is what facilitated the creation of a framework that resulted in a more coherent sud time” ().
Sakai (2009) exahe effects of repeated exposure in L2 listening tests of 36 university learners of English in Japan. The participants were divided into two listening proficiency groups and were required to write what they understood after listening to a set of passages twice. All the recall protocols were scored by the researcher, who reported high reliability. Results showed that for both groups of learners, the second effort was better than the first effort, and the study did not find any interactional effect between repetition and proficiency levels. The researcher thus concluded that the effects of repetition, regardless of proficiency level, facilitated listening prehension of the passage to a sio answer a ing research question about the effect of repetition on idiosyncratic recall protocols (i. e., additive information that does not appear in the original text) and ations (i. e., incorrect recall protocols), results indicated that repetition helped both groups of learners understand the text further and led to prehension of the passage.
Regarding the interactional effect between repetition and proficiency level, it can be clearly seen from the research reviewed above that the results of these studies are mixed. Whereas sog & Read, 2006; Lund, 1991) reported an interactional effect between repetition and proficiency, other studies (e. g., Cervantes & Gainer, 1992; Sakai, 2009) did not. In an atte the mixed results that these studies have produced, Sakai (2009) exahe results of Chang and Read's study and noted that repetition may in fact have improved the perfory groups (high and low proficiency groups), but the changes for the low proficiency groups were not sufficient to achieve statistical significance. As for Lund's study, Sakai'noted that Lund found a statistically significant interactional effect only in one of the two analyses of the recall protocol. In addition, Sakai believed “the mixed results of the previous studies may be due to different analysis methods” (). Also, the mixed results of these studies can be aounted for by the fact that they used different tasks to assess listening prehension (e. g., a free written task [Lund], a e test [Chang & Read], a partial dictation task [Cervantes & Gainer], and a free written recall task [Sakai]), which only required test takers to listen to part of the passages.
One research purpose of the present study is to investigate the effects of different listening conditions, i. e., of single exposure to a listening passage (listening one time) versus repeated exposure to a listening passage (listening three times), on learners' listening coal vocabulary acquisition. A question of considerable interest is the extent to which repetition assists both vocabulary acquisition and listening prehension. While there is clear evidence to suggest that repetition aids listening cotly known about whether and how repetition aids vocabulary acquisition.
Schema
Listening is a plex, active process of interpretation in which listeners match what they hear with what they already know (Vandergrift, 2002). Background knowledge plays a crucial role in understanding a language. It is often the absence or inpleteness of background information that results in non-co prehension that L2 listeners experience. In other words, “where the language element in fact presents no obstacle … it is the lack of shared contextual information or scheprehension difficult or impossible” (Anderson & Lynch, 1988, ).