A Study Of The Effects Of Four Forms Of Listening Support On The Listening Comprehension Of EFL Learners

This thesis aims at finding out the effects of four forms of listening support on the listening comprehension of EFL learners, and putting forward some implications to English listening teaching.This thesis is composed of six parts.Chapter One is a brief introduction to the study of listening. The purpose and significance of the present study are also proposed in this part.Chapter Two presents a general review of four forms of listening support and their effects on listening comprehension. Then, comments on the related theories and studies are given.Chapter Three, the core of this thesis, is devoted to an experiment which aims at testing the effects of the four forms of different listening support. The subjects are 120 freshmen from four classes in Jimei University. A pre-test shows that they are similar in English listening proficiency. The four groups receive four different forms of listening support, namely, the question preview (QP) support, the repeated input (RI) support, the vocabulary instruction (VI) support and the topic- related (TP) support, during the experimental tests.Chapter Four reports the results of the experiment by analyzing the collected data. Qualitative and quantitative analyses are conducted in this part. The results indicate that the RI group (M= 75.58) performs the best, followed by the TP (M= 71.67) and VI (M= 70.42) groups, and the QP (M= 68.42) group performs the poorest while the RI group performs significantly better than the VI (P = 0.048) and QP (P = 0.006) groups. However, no significant difference can be found between the RI and TP groups.Chapter Five introduces the conclusions and the pedagogical implications of the study. Then follow the limitations of the study. Finally some suggestions for further studies are made.