The Effect Of Proficiency Level On Efl Listening

The issue of the effect of proficiency level in listening comprehension for L2 learners has been much debated. This thesis, which aims to gain more understanding of this issue, reports the results of an empirical study to investigate the effect of proficiency level in relation to topic-familiarity on Chinese EEL learners?use of the two processing modes (Bottom-up and Top-down) when listening to English texts. In the study, three groups of students from Shen Yang University were used as subjects. The first two groups were identified as having intermediate proficiency level (the first group, low intermediate; the second group, high-intermediate), while the third group as having high proficiency level. Two texts were prepared for the purpose of the study, one on a topic the students were assumed to be familiar with, the second on a topic assumed to be unfamiliar. After listening to each text twice, the subjects were required to write an immediate recall protocol and to complete a self 梤eport questionnaire aiming to probe their listening process. The results of the experiments showed both types of processing modes were used in all groups of subjects with both familiar and unfamiliar texts. Bottom-up processing was shown to play a more vital role than top-down processing in all groups in successful comprehension. For lower- level listeners, top-down processing plays a compensatory role for bottom-up processing in all cases (with familiar or unfamiliar text). For high-level learners, top-down processing plays a facilitating role in bottom-up processing in all cases. Results suggest that language proficiency level determines how the two modes of processing will be used in listening comprehension and the effect of topic familiarity is stronger on intermediate 條evel students than on high-level students. The findings of the study have special pedagogical implications. For the low proficiency level students, the fact that they are weak in bottoming-up processing suggest that on the one hand, the lower-level students need a lot of prior knowledge to compensate for the lack of automatized linguistic decoding skill. On the other hand, they need to learn to become less reliant on guessing from prior knowledge and more reliant on rapid and accurate decoding of the linguistic input. In teaching, teachers should continue to strengthen the training of students? language decoding ability through all possible means. Teachers should also emphasize the teaching of cultural knowledge and encourage students to accumulate as much knowledge as possible. For the high level students, the fact that they are strong in bottom-up processing implied that they don抰 have to pay special effort to the individual words or sounds, which leaves more time for them to store more input in working memory. Ho~vever, sometimes high-level students still have to pay attention to certain phrases or sentence structures, when they feel uncertain about their comprehension. This shows that they are still not perfectly 揳utomatic?in the decoding of the input, though they have already achieved a relatively high level. In listening classes, teachers could do more than simply provide comprehensible input by pairing learning strategy instruction with listening tasks, making students become strategically smart and meanwhile encouraging learners to negotiate and interpret meaning in problem-solving activities which challenge them cognitively as well as linguistically. It seems that developing skills in learning how to learn and helping...