The Effects Of Language Proficiency, Topic Familiarity And Text Type On Vietnamese Students' Chinese Listening Comprehension --An Empirical Study From RT Perspective

Listening Comprehension is an important part in language use and learning. In the past two decades or so, a lot of researches have probed into the processes of FL listening comprehension from the perspective of Schema Theory (ST henceforth), and these researches have brought about fruitful outcomes. Nevertheless, FL studies conducted under the theoretical framework of Relevance Theory (RT henceforth) can scarcely be found in the literature. Besides, nowadays, more and more overseas students come to China to study Chinese. In the teaching of CFL to them , there is lots of research room needs to be explored further and LC is one of the factors which are easily neglected. Due to the dearth of such kind of research, the present study is none other than an attempt to explore the factors affecting CFL LC from the perspective of RT.This article takes listening comprehension as a process of an active communication between listeners and speakers, that is to say, an interaction between new information and old information and a process that listener seeks optimum relevance through making inference. To make the research feasible, the present research only focuses on the effects of language proficiency( advanced & intermediate), topic familiarity(familiar & unfamiliar) and text type( narrative & descriptive) on the Vietnamese students' CFL transactional listening comprehension from RT perspective.The subjects of the research are 66 second-year and 87 first-year Vietnamese students who are learning Chinese in South West JiaotongUniversity. They are required to take two tests: one test with two familiar passages of different text types (one is descriptive and the other narrative ); the other test with two unfamiliar passages of different text types (they are a descriptive text and a narrative text respectively). Each test requires the. subjects to answer four global and six local questions in Chinese, in Chinese phonetic letters or in English. Both quantitative and qualitative analysis results indicate that topic familiarity, language proficiency and text type exert great influence on the subjects' listening comprehension. More specifically, it is found that topic familiarity produces a greater main effect on the LC of the subjects than what proficiency level does. Text type, however, produces no significant effect. And the interaction between topic familiarity and language proficiency is not statistically significant either. From the perspective of RT, the author attempts to elucidate the research results.Based on the results, a conclusion is drawn that certain background knowledge, enough linguistic knowledge such as the ability of quickly distinguishing word-meanings, and the skills of predicting and inferring are the three factors essential to effective listening comprehension. Furthermore, the full awareness of listening tasks in listening comprehension is also important to improve the students' listening efficiency and performance.