Effects Of Listener Characteristic Factors On EFL Students' Listening Comprehension

The present study,with schema theory and relevance theory as theoretical framework,attempts to better our understanding of the cognitive process of EFL listening comprehension through discussing the effects of several important listener characteristic factors on it: language proficiency level, background knowledge and self-confidence. 55 Chinese college students were randomly selected as subjects and divided into two groups according to their language proficiency level. Then they were given listening tests and their self-confidence scores collected at the same time. Both quantitative and qualitative analyses are employed to interpret the results.The results indicate that both language proficiency and listeners' background knowledge variables have significant effect on listening comprehension. Students' language proficiency level is the most powerful predictor of their listening comprehension ability. There exits a strong positive correlation between the students' self-confidence and their listening comprehension performance. However, the effect of this affective factor is complicated and therefore a tentative analysis is made in the thesis.The study finds that relevance theory is more powerful in explaining the cognitive process of listening comprehension for it can provide a better explanation for all the major findings of the study with great consistency and efficiency, while some of the results can't be well explained by schema theory. So relevance theory might be more helpful to help reveal EFL learners' mental processes in listening comprehension and it is strongly recommended in the future research.This study also reveals that learners' self-confidence is a very good index of their performance in listening comprehension tests. From relevance perspective, listeners' self-confidence level represents the strength of the relevance link between their needs and listening input. This finding is also valuable to the quantification of relevance link so as to further the theoretical discussions of relevance theory limited to a qualitative approach in the past.