| The present study employed a one-between one-within experimental design to investigate the effects of culture-specific knowledge as well as visual cues on EFL listening comprehension of Chinese senior high school students. The major research questions explored in the study are: (1) Do EFL learners perform better in listening comprehension when they have culture-specific knowledge about the listening topic than when they do not have such knowledge? (2) Do EFL learners perform better in listening comprehension when they are provided visual cues than when they are not?;In the study, subjects were 122 Chinese students randomly selected from the 10th-graders in a senior high school in Taiwan. Listening materials were two short lectures; one describes a Chinese holiday--the Dragon Boat Festival, and the other describes an American holiday--Thanksgiving Day. There were three different kinds of presentation for each lecture, including an audiotape of the lecture, a videotape which recorded the speaker while he was giving the lecture, and a videotape which consisted of pictures related to the content of the lecture. Subjects completed four tasks, i.e., a profile, a recall protocol, sentence recognition questions, and a questionnaire.;The results support the significant role played by background knowledge in language comprehension by providing proof for the facilitating effect of culture-specific knowledge on L2 listening comprehension. Moreover, the study offers empirical evidence for the advantage of videotapes over audiotapes in L2 listening comprehension. Results also indicate the significant relationship between EFL learners' proficiency and their performance in listening comprehension. In addition, the study gives some perspectives on EFL learners' attitudes toward and strategies used regarding culture-specific knowledge and visual cues when listening to lectures. It seems that the EFL listeners in the present study prefer culturally familiar topics to unfamiliar topics. They seem to mainly rely on background knowledge to comprehend a culturally familiar lecture and depend on linguistic knowledge to comprehend an unfamiliar lecture. With respect to visual cues, they like watching videotapes more than listening to audiotapes, and consider such techniques as helpful for their listening comprehension. |
