The Effects Of Pre-listening Vocabulary Instruction And Background Knowledge Input On Non-English Majors' EFL Listening Comprehension

Pre-listening activity plays an important role in making the listening more effective. There are many forms of pre-listening activities, such as question preview, brainstorming, topic-related discussion, pre-teaching vocabulary, semantic mapping, to name a few, among which providing listeners with instruction of related vocabulary and background knowledge has been commonly adopted in classroom practice. But the empirical studies on their effects on listening comprehension are not abundant. Only in the past decades, a few researchers began to conduct experiments to test the effectiveness of these pre-listening activities and gained quite different even controversial findings.The present study aims to investigate and compare the effectiveness of pre-listening vocabulary instruction and providing background knowledge on EFL learners'listening comprehension. Based on schema theory, an experiment was conducted, which was designed to answer the following research questions: (1) Does vocabulary instruction shortly before listening have significant effect on improving learners'listening comprehension? (2) Does the provision of related background knowledge have a significant facilitative effect on enhancing learners'listening comprehension? (3) Which form of pre-listening activity is more effective, vocabulary instruction or the provision of related background knowledge? The experiment involved 120 subjects who were sophomores of Tianshui Normal University, majoring in history. They came from three natural classes and pre-test indicated that there was no significant difference among their listening comprehension proficiency. So in the experiment, they were randomly divided into CG group, VI group and BKI group. All subjects completed a comprehension test after listening to four passages of unfamiliar topics. But before listening to the passages, only VI group and BKI group received instruction of vocabulary and background knowledge respectively. Besides, an interview was also carried out to get more information. After scoring all the papers, the data was analyzed on computer by employing SPSS 13.0. Two kinds of statistics analyses were adopted: the descriptive statistics and one-way ANOVA.The experiment results reveal that (1) The provision of related background knowledge takes significant effect on learners'listening comprehension. (2) Although lack of vocabulary is the listeners'major concern, vocabulary instruction shortly before listening does not have a significant facilitative effect on learners'listening comprehension. (3) Vocabulary instruction by itself is not an effective means of enhancing listening comprehension. By contrast, providing listener with background knowledge seems to be more effective to improve the learners'listening comprehension.To the results of the experiment, the author offered explanation from the schema theory and the relevant theories on listening process. The provision of the background knowledge of the topic can facilitate the listeners'activation of resident schema and building absent schema; rich content schema can compensate for the inadequate linguistic schema. Secondly, pre-listening providing the background knowledge of the topic can encourage the listeners more employ the top-down processing model to predict, to select the information properly and to eliminate the ambiguity quickly. The ineffectiveness of pre-listening vocabulary instruction can be attributed to the lack of automatic processes. It means that short time vocabulary learning did not facilitate the learners to perceive the new words quickly and match the acoustic signals with its meaning appropriately. Learners need more time to practice these lexical items and it takes long time to automatize processing.The findings of this study may have implications for classroom listening teaching. They support a focus on background knowledge in the actual teaching practice of EFL listening comprehension, and urge the learners to pay more attention to the accumulation of background knowledge. Suggestions on how to carry out pre-listening activity in classroom are also presented.