An Empirical Study Of The Effects Of Listening Support On The Listening Performance Of EFL Learners

Listening is perhaps the most essential skill among the four language skills--listening,speaking,reading and writing;it internalizes language rules and promote the emergence of other languages and also attracts attention of English researchers.However,listening is the weakest part for Chinese undergraduates due to lack of target language environment.The aim of conducting listening supports is to reduce the difficulties that students encounter in listening comprehension and finally help them improve listening ability,which has great significance in English listening instruction.Many researches conducted home and abroad have shown that listening supports that were used before listening could greatly facilitate students' listening comprehension.However,there are few empirical studies about which one is more effective and no consensus among researchers is reached.Therefore,the present study aims to explore which listening supports(LS)leads to a higher level of listening performance and students' opinions towards listening supports are also surveyed.The thesis is designed to investigate the following research question:(1)Can listening supports affect EFL college students' listening performance?(2)Which type of listening support will lead to a higher level of listening performance?(3)What is the effect of listening support on students with different language proficiency?(4)What are students' opinions towards different types of listening supports?The 164 participants were sophomores from four intact classes of Hubei University.The pre-test showed that they had the similar language proficiency.The four classes received the treatment of previewing question(PQ),providing topic knowledge(PTK),instructing vocabulary(?)and repeated input(RI)respectively.The experiment lasted for 8 weeks,during which each of the students had two listening tests,two training sessions.Twelve students were chosen to participate the interview immediately after the post-test.The data of the present study were collected from listening tests,questionnaires and interviews.The quantitative data were analyzed with SPSS,and the qualitative data were processed by descriptive analysis.The major findings of the research are presented as follows:(1)Listening supports facilitated students' listening comprehension,among which RI and PTK were significantly effective to improve students' listening performance.(2)RI was the most effective listening support,followed by TP,while IV was the most ineffective one.(3)There was no interactional effect between listening support and language proficiency.In other words,the effect of listening support did not vary according to students' language proficiency.(4)Students attached great importance to listening supports and they were most in favor of PQ,followed by RI.The present study offers some empirical statistics about the effects of listening supports on the listening performance of EFL learners.And it informs some pedagogical practice on how to improve the teaching of English listening in Chinese college English classroom:for students with medium and high language proficiency,RI is effective for facilitating their listening comprehension,but for students with low language profiiciency,some additional listening supports are needed.PTK is helpful for facilitating students' listening comprehension and teachers can provide some topic-related knowledge before listening to attract students and activate the schemata in their heads.PQ is the most popular listening support and teachers should spare enough time for students to read comprehension questions and make prediction.Vocabulary is thought to be the biggest barrier for students in listening,However,instructing vocabulary is not as effective as expected.Therefore,students should be encouraged to enlarge vocabulary through extensive reading in their spare time.