| The primary purpose of this study was to examine the effects of advance organizers (AOs), which were defined as one-sentence statements in this study, on the listening comprehension of Japanese college students learning English as a foreign language (EFL). The secondary purpose was to explore what a score obtained from the Johnson system, a major scoring procedure to grade recall protocols, would represent.; A total of 177 students listened to two passages and wrote recall protocols. The results of a 2 (treatment: AO or No AO) x 3 (proficiency level: High, Intermediate, or Low) multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA) and follow-up analyses indicated a significant main effect of treatment, but did not find interaction effect significant. Two t-tests to compare the AO and No AO groups found that the t value from the t-test on recalling important units was larger than that from the t-test on recalling unimportant units. In comparison of the Johnson system and two other scoring procedures, it was observed that the Johnson system (weighted) always generated the same results as the Thematic (counting only important units) and the Dichotomous scoring procedures (non-weighted). In addition, the Pearson correlation coefficients between the Johnson system and those scoring procedures were very high.; This study concluded that: (1) The use of AOs increased the listening comprehension; (2) The effects of the AOs were consistent across the proficiency level in listening; (3) The AOs strengthened the tendency that the subjects recalled more important units; (4) The Johnson system seemed to accurately measure the total amount of recall; (5) A high score obtained from the Johnson system appeared to represent not only a high amount of total recall but also a high amount of recall of important units.; To summarize, this study presents evidence that showed AOs could be a useful technique to enhance EFL learners' listening comprehension, and AOs seemed especially effective to remember important information. |
