| Genre, with its socially rooted nature and the recognizable language patterns, offers frameworks for structuring of syllabuses and materials. A genre-based approach has been seen as of great practicability and value to language teaching and learning. The present study attempts to investigate the effect of genre on EFL learners' listening comprehension. Listening comprehension test was administered to 53 EFL learners in their second year in college. The listening materials consisted of six passages from three different genres: casual conversation, lecture and news, which vary in their generic structures and language features. Casual conversation is the most oral and informal, followed by lecture and then by news. The test questions included both global and local types, which were classified according to the strategies utilized for text processing. After the comprehension test, six interviewees were chosen from the 53 participants to do an oral report. Their feedbacks were recorded as further support to the test results. The results indicated that different genres of texts resulted in different test scores. Performances on both global and local questions in casual conversation were the best among the three genres. Performance on global questions in lecture was relatively poor, because the participants lacked enough listening experience in this genre; performance on local questions in news was also not ideal, as news contained many literate vocabulary and sentences. The results of the present study suggest that knowledge of genres plays an important role in EFL learners' listening comprehension.
|
PDF Full Text Request