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The Effects Of Topic Familiarity And English Language Proficiency On Chinese English Majors’ Listening Comprehension

Posted on:2015-09-03Degree:MasterType:Thesis
Country:ChinaCandidate:Zhang ShuangFull Text:PDF
GTID:2285330422486642Subject:Foreign Linguistics and Applied Linguistics
Abstract/Summary:PDF Full Text Request
Listening is the most significant part in foreign language learning. Inrecent years, more and more attention has been drawn to listening in thestudy of foreign language teaching. Students put much emphasis onlistening not only in middle and high schools, but also in universities;however, little improvement can be made with large amounts of listeninginput. This situation is very common in China. In terms of universityEnglish major students, listening comprehension is still a big matter forthe majority of them. There are many factors affecting L2listening, suchas age, sex, L2proficiency, and text type, etc. The present study aims toinvestigate the effects of English proficiency and topic familiarity onChinese university English major students’ listening comprehension.In the present study, the researcher makes a review of the relatedstudies both at home and abroad, pointing out some problems in theprevious researches. The majority of the previous studies take schematheory to be their theoretical foundation, however, due to various reasons,there are no consistent results. Hence, the present study adopts schematheory, together with the information processing theory, to make anin-depth analysis of the effects of English proficiency and topicfamiliarity on Chinese university English major students’ listeningcomprehension. The participants of the present study are the sophomore and juniorEnglish majors who come from Weinan Normal University. Their Englishproficiency is measured through a language proficiency test. They arerequired to listen to four different passages on different topics. With theSPSS (17.0) software, the researcher makes an analysis based on theresults of the topic familiarity questionnaire, language proficiency testand listening comprehension test.This study finds: first, topic familiarity significantly affects Englishmajor students’ listening comprehension; second, there exists interactiveeffects of topic familiarity and L2proficiency on listening comprehension.When the listeners are at the same L2proficiency level, high topicfamiliarity listeners significantly comprehend better than low topicfamiliarity listeners; when listeners are at the same topic familiarity level,no significant difference in comprehension is detected. The researcherinfers that the listeners may have difficulty in linking their priorknowledge with the listening materials due to the unknown vocabularyand phrases. On the other hand, Listeners who have low L2proficiencybut high topic familiarity significantly comprehend better than thelisteners who have high L2proficiency but low topic familiarity.
Keywords/Search Tags:Topic familiarity, Language proficiency, Schema theory, Information processing theory, Listening comprehension
PDF Full Text Request
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