The Effects Of Prior Knowledge And Text Types On Listening Comprehension

It has been generally agreed that listening comprehension is the foundation of language acquisition. However, careful observation of school English teaching practice has found that the teaching of listening skills is still the weak link in the language teaching process. One of the reasons why the listener fails to process incoming speech is the lack of background information of the topics in the texts (Anderson & Lynch 1988). Another important factor that influences listening comprehension is the text type (Rubin,1994; Anderson & Lynch,1988). However, in view of an overview of current studies on the relationship between prior knowledge and listening comprehension, almost all of them have focused on the listening comprehension of monologic text. It is of imperative need to study the effects of prior knowledge on listening comprehension of the speech produced in natural setting.Schema theory dwells on how people store and use knowledge about a domain. For linguistics, schema theory emphasizes the role of background information (i.e. prior knowledge) in language comprehension and in language acquisition. From the information processing perspective, we basically have three kinds of memory stores: sensory memory, short-term memory, and long-term memory. Cognitive scholars regard that listening comprehension consists of perception, parsing and utilization. Therefore, based on schema theory and the information processing theory, the present study probes into the effects of prior knowledge on two types of texts:the interview and the report. This empirical study also tries to find out which text type students perform better when there is prior knowledge treatment and when there is no prior knowledge treatment.55 freshman English majors from two natural classes in Hunan University were selected as subjects of this study, one as the experimental group, the other the control group. The materials used in this study were an interview "Christmas Jar" and a report "Shamanism". Both two topics were unfamiliar to the subjects according to a questionnaire of topic familiarity conducted in another comprehensive university. The control group had two treatment lessons of relevant knowledge on the two topics. Then the subjects did recall protocol listening tests, which were designed in line with the two listening texts, after listening to the report or the interview each time. Participants in the control group filled out a brief questionnaire of familiarity topic after listening each time to make sure the validity of the data collected. Statistical analyses of the scores were performed with SPSS. The results show that:(1) prior knowledge has effects on listening comprehension of both types of texts; (2) students always perform better in the interview than in the report regardless of the prior knowledge. Based on these findings, when we teach L2 listening, we should make use of students' prior knowledge in listening teaching, and a variety of text types should be covered. Language instruction materials used in classroom should include various topics so as to expand learners' interest as well as their world knowledge.