First used in cognitive psychology, the word “schema”has been adopted in a nuext of listening, “schema”refers to “a sisting of relevant individual knowledge, memory, and experience, which allows us to incorporate what we hear into what we know” (Anderson & Lynch, 1988, ). People have thousands of schemas in their memory and these scheed with one another. Every time we are engaged in reading, listening to, or observing so to another through logical links, we create new schemas and our existing schemas are updated.
Research into the effects of scheprehension has predominantly focused on reading, rather than listening. Carrell and Eisterhold (1983) explain that background knowledge in the readers' facilitate L2 reading prehension. Siive process and suessful listening prehension requires an in teraction between the listening context and the listener's existing background knowledge which provides them with a frame of reference where they can cohe new incohey already have.
pared with L2 readers, L2 listeners face additional difficulties in making sense of what they hear, especially at lower levels of proficiency, because in most cases speech is temporary, less clearly produced and more implicit than written language. For this reason, the role of scheowledge has been recognized as an important factor that affects listening prehension. Brown and Yule (1983, ) describe schema as “organized background knowledge which leads us to expect or predict aspects in our interpretation of discourse”. They explain that listeners'background knowledge and prior experiences predispose thestruct expectations about seven areas: speaker, listener, place, tiopic, and co-text in order to interpret the discourse. Long (1989) further explains that learners construct prehension process through segking the aural input into ively g the results with their existing linguistic and world knowledge, a process that enables listeners to make inferences, which is a cognitive strategy used by listeners to facilitate prehension. Rost (1990, ) defines the base or scheing of a text as “the cultural and experiential fra able by a listener”.
To address the role of scheowledge in facilitating L2 listening, Long (1990) explored the effect of background knowledge on L2 listening prehension. Students of Spanish listened to two passages, one faher unfaprehension was assessed by a recall protocol in English and a recognition measure. Although no significant differences were found between the familiar and unfamiliar passages, Long attributes this result to the content of the checklist, which was less difficult pared to the recall measure and thus could have enhanced the probability of correct answers. Sio exahe effect of topic familiarity on L2 listening co (1994) carried out a study of university students of Spanish who listened to two passages, one about a faher about a novel topic. The results, obtained through a native language immediate recall procedure, showed that the learners scored considerably higher on the fa on the new one. The study reveals that scheowledge in the form of topic familiarity is a powerful factor in facilitating listening prehension.
Tyler (2001) pared the responses of L1 and L2 listeners to spoken texts with or without advanced knowledge of topic. He found that prior knowledge of the topic did not result in any significant difference between the two groups in the de working heless, when given no prior information about the topic, the de working tly higher for the L2 group than for the L1 group. Tyler thus concluded that background knowledge assists prehension by freeing up the listeners' mental resources, allowing more attention to be directed at processing the language input.
A study carried out by Sadighi and Zare (2006) exahe effect of background knowledge on soe-to-advanced-level Iranian EFL learners' listening prehension in preparing for their TOEFL exam. The experiopics by using different resources such as the inter before ing to the class. The co results revealed a significant difference in favor of the experids further support to the iowledge in listening prehension.
Besides the studies investigating the role of general background knowledge by exploring the influence of learners'content schemata, some studies (e. g., Hohzawa, 1998; Chang & Read, 2006) also included pre-listening activities or advance organizers to prepare students by activating their background knowledge about unfa virtually every listening situation, it is clearly advantageous to coo call on knowledge from their stored prototypes. Once the knowledge is activated, additional information, stored as related schees available to the listener. Meanwhile, whenever a knowledge structure is activated, the listener also experiences an affective response which further influences connections with the speaker's own ideas, and elicits an empathic response.
Activation of prior knowledge has been shown to have salutary effects on L2 listening suess (e. g., Long, 1990; Sch, 1994). Research into pre-listening activities has docu listening performance for advance organizers (Chung, 2002; Herron, Cole, York, & Linden, 1998), question type (Flowerdew & ion preview (Elkhafaifi, 2005). These studies have demonstrated that it is helpful to provide learners with a context before they begin to listen.
he importance of pre-listening activities in facilitating L2 listening prehension as they “activate the students'existing knowledge of the topic in order for theprehend and to use this as a basis of their hypothesis-inforion, andinferencing”. Providing listeners with the knowledge or contextual support required for the task can orient them to what they are about to listen to, thus directing their attention to the task rather than having them listen aimlessly.
Hohzawa (1998) found that providing listeners with a chance to activate their prior knowledge affected prehension and the kind of processing L2 listeners did. He tested the coe Japanese students in an intensive English program, where the students were assigned to “background information”and “no background information”groups. Students took a proficiency test and were tested on their familiarity with the topics of three news stories. Then they listened to the stories, wrote recalls, took a coook the familiarity udents in the “background information”group heard the introduction to the news stories and discussed the content of the stories briefly. Hohzawa found that students who established background inforo use more top-down processes and that their prehension was greater than the students in the “no background information”group.
Chang and Read (2006) investigated the effectiveness of providing four types of listening support to EFL learners: topic preparation, vocabulary instruction, question preview, and repeated input. The results of the study showed that the most effective type of support was providing prior infor addition, the fact that mean scores of the high and low level language learners in the topic-preparation group were quite similar showed that providing background knowledge about the topic enabled the low level learners to pensate for their limited language knowledge.
Al Alili (2009) designed a study to deterher learners' listening prehension of an unfamiliar text would vary as a function of different advanced organizers to activate the background knowledge. Three groups of Arabic-speaking EFL learners were involved in the study. In one experi schema (knowledge about the topic) was activated, and the formal schema (knowledge about text structure and discourse organization) of another experimental group was activated, and the control group received neither type of advanced organizer. The results of a listening co indicated that learners whose content background knowledge was activated scored slightly higher than those whose formal background knowledge was activated. Statistical analysis, however, showed no significant differences. Nevertheless, based on responses to a post-study questionnaire, the students in the experimental groups perceived the pre-listening activities to be very helpful in enhancing their understanding and prediction of the listening text. The results of this study support the importance of helping learners ween their existing knowledge and the ining aural input.
Because of the demands of listening, L2 listeners are likely to be forced to rely on their background knowledge to interpret the text more than L2 readers are (Lund, 1991). It may be that prior knowledge actually pris and their meanings and allows listeners to take a broader view of a text and rad, 1989). In other words, it may be that prior knowledge allows listeners to devote less working g the input linguistically, and so to prehend more with less effort (Tyler, 2001).
To sum up, the results of the research reviewed above were not unanierning the role of scheowledge in facilitating L2 listening. On the one hand, Sch (1994) and Sadighi & Zare (2006) found significant L2 listening differences in favor of the experimental group with schehus lent further support to the iowledge in listening coher hand, Long (1990) and Tyler (2001) could not find significant differences between the groups with and without prior information ontopic, though Tyler cohat background knowledge assisted prehension by freeing up the listeners' mental resources, allowing g the language input. Regarding the role of pre-listening activity in facilitating L2 listening prehension, schema-raising activity was proved to be an effective type of listening support in enhancing learners'understanding and prediction, for it both helped the higher level learners to use more top-down processes and enabled the low level learners to pensate for their limited language knowledge. However, these studies igate the effects of schema raising as a type of pre-listening training on learners' incidental vocabulary acquisition from listening activities and none of the studies was adext.
One of the research purposes concerning this study is to investigate the effects that a schema raising activity prior to listening has on learners' listening coal vocabulary acquisition. A question of considerable interest is the extent to which a schema raising activity assists both vocabulary acquisition and listening prehension. While there is clear evidence to suggest that it aids listening prehension, little is known to date about whether and how a schema raising activity prior to listening aids vocabulary learning through listening.