The Relative Effect Of Vocabulary And Background Knowledge On EFL Listening Comprehension

During the long time of EFL listening comprehension teaching practice, the method of offering listeners pre-listening instructions of related vocabulary and topic background knowledge has been long adopted by the language teachers. In the early studies of teaching methodology, there have been teachers who have pointed out the importance of vocabulary and background knowledge as two affecting factors of EFL listening comprehension. However, their viewpoints were only got from their years of teaching practice, not based on the scientific researches. Only in the past decade a few language researchers have set out to conduct scientific experiments to investigate the effect of background knowledge on EFL listening comprehension and have presented some findings. However, the present researcher still thinks that there is more to be done. Reasons are as follows: firstly, though some researchers have discovered that background knowledge may work differently on EFL listeners of different listening proficiency levels, they failed to provide theoretical explanations to it; secondly, few scientific experiments have been conducted to test the effectiveness of the pr-listening instructions of background knowledge in EFL listening comprehension teaching classrooms; and thirdly, few researchers have ever investigated the relative importance of vocabulary and background knowledge in EFL listening comprehension.The present researcher tends to investigate the relative effect of vocabulary and background knowledge on EFL listening comprehension of listeners of different proficiency levels. Based on the findings and methodology of the previous studies in this field, two experiments were conducted in this research, which involved 68 subjects who were the first-year English majors of National University of Defense Technology. They were divided into two classes, one as experiment group and the other as control group. The subjects completed a comprehension test after listening to each lecture, and in the first experiment they completed a vocabulary test before they listened to each lecture. Their scores formed a set of the database. In the first experiment, all the subjects listened to two lectures, one of familiar topic and the other of unfamiliar topic. Experiment 1 is designed to test the following hypotheses: the listeners would achieve higher scores on the post-lecture comprehension test when they are familiar with the topic than when they listen to unfamiliar topic; the scores made by listeners on the pre-listening vocabulary tests would have a positive correlation with their scores on the post-lecture comprehension tests. In the second experiment both groups listened to two lectures of unfamiliar topics, but only the experiment group had pre-listeninginstructions of background knowledge and vocabulary. Experiment 2 is designed to test the following hypotheses: the listeners in the experiment group would achieve higher scores on the post-lecture comprehension tests than those who were in the control group; the listeners in the experiment group would perform better on the post-lecture comprehension test when they were provided with the vocabulary knowledge than when they were provided with the background knowledge of the topic.The statistical correlation tests and the independent sample t-tests were adopted in this research to analyze the scores collected in the experiments.The experiment results suggest that the listeners' vocabulary knowledge have a strong effect on their EFL listening comprehension, no matter how proficient they are. The background knowledge of the topic also affects the listeners' comprehension, but the effect could only be significant for those proficient listeners who have already gained a solid foundation of vocabulary knowledge. The findings also prove that the pre-listening instruction of vocabulary is easier to be carried out and take effect than the background knowledge instruction in the actual teaching practice of EFL listening comprehension.To the results of the experiments, the present researcher finds explanations from the related theories on listening process and the schema theory. According to the related theories on listening process, the listeners use their background knowledge to make inferences and guesses about the incoming information and then use their vocabulary knowledge to check the previous guesses and make judgments on the meaning. Therefore since the more proficient listeners possess a more solid body of vocabulary than the less proficient ones do, they could make their judgments more accurate while checking their guesses about the incoming information during the listening process. Furthermore, according to what has been stated in the schemata theory, it could be explained that the absence of the necessary knowledge of vocabulary and background in the existing schemata of the listeners may prevent the meaning from being constructed quickly and accurately.The research findings of this research may have implications for classroom instruction. They support a focus on vocabulary instruction in the actual teaching practice of EFL listening comprehension, and urge the learners to pay more attention to a long-term vocabulary building. Suggestions on how to carry out vocabulary instruction in classroom are also provided.