A Study On The Chunk Capacity Among Chinese EFL Learners Of Different Listening Proficiency

English learning has become a fad in China nowadays. People of different ages andbackgrounds are working very hard on it. Listening plays a critical role in languagelearning and EFL learners are eager to find out an effective way to improve theirlistening proficiency. Working memory capacity has been proved to have highcorrelation with listening proficiency. Therefore, many scholars and teachersadvocated the application of chunk teaching in listening classroom as chunks canexpand working memory capacity and facilitate information processing. Severalresearches have been done on chunk and L2listening, but no one has explored howdifferent the chunk capacity in the working memory is for learners of differentlistening proficiency, which is the task of this thesis. We used four types of sentencelist to test the chunk capacity of the subjects, i.e. four-short-sentence list,eight-short-sentence list, four-long-sentence list, and four-random-sentence list. ThirtyChinese college students were asked to do a verbal free recall of the stimuli. Theresponses of the subjects were measured by total words recalled, clauses accessed,and clause completion, from which we can tell the chunk number and chunk size inworking memory. By repeated-measures analysis of variation, post-hocNewman-Keuls test and independent-sample t-test, we found that two groups had nosignificant difference in chunk size but in chunk number. The evidence showed thatboth groups processed information in chunks and the high efficiency group hadgreater number of chunks in working memory and better chunking ability than thelow efficiency group.