Decoding And Meaning Building In English Listening Comprehension

Nowadays, more and more researchers incline to define listening comprehension as a dynamic process in which listeners actively construct meaning by drawing upon knowledge and strategies and interacting with listening texts. However, the processes of listening comprehension are interconnected, recursive and difficult to observe. It is difficult for researchers to carry out empirical studies on the listening comprehension process. From a pedagogical perspective. Field (2008a) argues that listening processes are represented by aspects of listener behavior that have been observed and investigated. He makes an important distinction between the two major operations involved in listening-decoding and meaning building. Decoding operation means translating the speech signal into speech sounds, words and clauses, and finally into a literal meaning. Meaning building operation means drawing upon co-text and external knowledge and making decisions to overall meaning. The sharp distinction between two operations is that decoding operation emphasize on highly automaticity while meaning building operation focus on making rational decisions.Taking Field’s theory as the theoretical framework, the present study examines the decoding operation and the meaning building operation of Chinese EFL listeners, aiming to offer empirical support for listening pedagogy. To be more specific, the decoding operation involves multiple highly automatic processes, but the main goal is to recognize words. The meaning building operation involves manifold processes which are more rational, but it relies on a variety of strategies to make decisions. Clearly, word recognition and strategy use do not include all the processes in the two operations, but they can represent the distinction between them. Therefore, the researcher conducted two experiments to explore the word recognition and strategy use in Chinese EFL listening and their relationship, aiming to offer empirical support for listening pedagogy. Three research questions are as follows:(1) In decoding, how much of the input is likely to be successfully decoded in terms of content words vs. function words, nouns vs. verbs and prepositions in verb phrases vs. prepositions in prepositional phrases?(2) In meaning building, what strategies do students with different levels of listening proficiency and linguistic knowledge use?(3)To what extent are any differences among learners’strategy use related to their performance in decoding?The first experiment took42non-English majors as the subjects and adopted paused transcription method to compare word recognitions of following word categories:content and function words, nouns and verbs, prepositions in prepositional phrases and verb phrases. Wilcoxon Test in SPSS18(a quantitive data analysis software) was used to conduct statistical analyses. This experiment was designed for Research Question1. Considering listening proficiency and linguistic knowledge as two factors, the second experiment took nine students out of42in the first experiment to study the listening strategy use by students in different groups. Data were collected through immediate retrospective verbalizations and then transcribed in Nvivo8(a qualitative data analysis software) to make a qualitative analysis. This experiment concerned with Research Question2and3.The major findings of the present study are as follows:First, recognitions of content words, nouns and prepositions in prepositional phrases were higher than those of function words, verbs and prepositions in verb phrases. In addition, learners with a more balanced noun/verb recognition profile tended to receive high listening comprehension scores and learners transcribed far more prepositional phrases than verb phrases.Second, in terms of freqency, the three dominant strategies employed by all groups of students are:elaboration, comprehension monitoring and real-time assessment of input. For different groups of students, the deployment of strategies in frequency use by high listening proficiency (HLP) and high linguistic knowledge (HLK) students are:elaboration, comprehension monitoring and general deduction. On the contray, low listening proficiency (LLP) and low linguistic knowledge (LLK) students only used comprehension monitoring frequenly. Two other groups, HLP&LLK and LLP&HLK students utilized elaboration, real-time assessment of input and elaboration, match lexis, respectively. In sum, it was more common for HLP&HLK students to use general deduction strategy together with hypothesis confirmation strategy. For LLP&LLK students, they were more likely to use the strategy of elimination deduction and monitoring for sense.Third, there is no simple linear relationship between the number of strategies students employ and word recognition ability. One student who transcribed up to97%of content words in the first experiment employed the least number of strategies. One possible explanation is that he decodes enough information from input that strategies are rarely employed. Nevertheless, three students deployed strategies more often than any other one. Two of them had a relatively high recognition of content words (90%). The possible explanation is that students employing a lot of strategies because they are risk takers who employ listening strategies which are not compensatory to make inference all the time. Another one had the lowest word recognition record among nine participants in Experiment2. Obviously, she employed a large number of listening strategies to compensate for gaps in understanding caused by poor decoding operation. In terms of specific strategies, students adopting general deduction and hypothesis confirmation had a higher recognition of content words while students using the strategy of fixation and transfer transcribed less content words and function words both.Despite some limitations, the present study may provide us with a better understanding of the cognitive process of listening comprehension. Besides, it also provides some pedagogical and practical implication for listening instruction. In listening classroom, teachers should train learners to listen out for content words, verbs in particular, and move from individual words to large chunks of language. Strategy use is a valuable way of supporting listening comprehension when one’s linguistic knowledge or listening experience is limited. But it also carries dangers which the teacher needs to recognize.The originality of the present study lies in:First, adopting decoding/meaning building distinction as a theoretical framework, we investigate listening comprehension process by observing differences of learners’decoding and meaning building operation. The results could be used to inform teachers of how skilled listeners behave and how to improve listeners’listening performance. Second, it adopts the paused transcription method which imitates real-life listening situation. Instead of using traditional error-analysis, the present study focuses on different word recognition to explore how much perceptual evidence is available to students. Third, in terms of strategy use, we do not only analyze the quantity of strategies, but also how strategies are employed in relation to different demands made by the pairs of listening questions. For one confounding variable-linguistic knowledge which is easily ignored in other studies, we combine this variable with listening proficiency to group students in four different categories and compare their strategy use.