The Effect Of Syntactic Modification On The Listening Comprehension Of Chinese EFL Learners

In recent years, considerable attention has been given to the role of input modification in EFL learners' comprehension. The present study is aimed to determine the effect of syntactic modification on the listening comprehension of Chinese-speaking English learners. It is based on the schema theory, Krashen's Input Hypothesis, and the foreigner talk discourse. The schema theory accounts for the nature of listening comprehension. Input Hypothesis and the foreigner talk discourse state the relationship between modified input and listening comprehension. A review of previous empirical studies helps the author set up the following hypotheses:1. Syntactic simplification can facilitate the listening comprehension ofintermediate level Chinese EFL learners.2. Syntactic elaboration can facilitate the listening comprehension of intermediate-level Chinese EFL learners.3. Syntactic elaboration is more effective than syntactic simplification on the listening comprehension of intermediate-level Chinese EFL learners.To test the three hypotheses, a listening test was administered to 111 second-year Chinese speaking English majors at intermediate-level of English proficiency. The listening materials were two passages which were considered to be unfamiliar to the subjects in the sense that they might have the common sense knowledge about them, but might not know the details mentioned in the passages. A post-test questionnaire was conducted to test the subjects' familiarity towards the passages. The two passages were modified into syntactically simplified versions and elaborated versions, and the unmodified passages remained as the baseline version. The baseline version mostly consisted of long and complex sentences. The simplified version was composedivof short and simple sentences. The elaborated version maintained much of the original complex sentence structures, but clarified message content and structure through topic saliency, and added redundancy through repetition, paraphrase, definition of the difficult items etc. Simple or complex sentences were measured by the number of words and S-nodes per T-unit. Vocabulary and content were held constant while sentence structures varied among the three versions. The subjects were divided into three groups, a control group and two experimental groups. Prior to research test, a pretest was administered to the three groups to find out if the subjects in the three groups were equivalent in terms of listening ability so that the result of the research test could be proved reliable. In the research test, each group only listened to one version of the two passages. The control group listened to the baseline version while the two experimental groups were assigned to respectively listen to the simplified version and the elaborated version. Comprehension was measured by the same short answer test. To ensure the reliability of rating, the same test paper was rated by two raters. If there was any discrepancy between the two, the mean score of the two raters was adopted. The results showed that the subjects who heard both the simplified version and the elaborated version obtained significantly higher scores than those who heard the baseline version. The subjects who heard the elaborated version also scored higher than the subjects who heard the simplified version, although the discrepancy was not so significant. Furthermore, the results indicated that both the simplified version and the elaborated version could facilitate the comprehension of details of the passages, but the facilitative effect of the elaborated version was more salient when it was required to make inferences and synthesize information. It was concluded that syntactic modification, either in the form of syntactic simplification or in the form of syntactic elaboration, played afacilitative role in the learners' listening comprehension, but syntactic elaboration was more effective than syntactic simplification, especially when inferring possible meanings and synthesizing information were r...