The Effects Of Task Characteristics On Second Language Listening Comprehension

The role of task has received an increasing amount of attention in the field of second language acquisition studies over the past three decades.To date,scant attention has been paid to the investigation of listening task characteristics.The present study intends to build and expand on this line of research by exploring the contribution of a group of task factors to 55 sophomores of English majors in completing an English as a second language(ESL)listening comprehension task,trying to answer the following four research questions:1.How do listening task characteristics influence the difficulty of listening comprehension?2.Which characteristics can better predict listening task difficulty?3.What is the relationship between listener perceptions of task difficulty,as measured by perception questionnaires,and actual task difficulty?4.What aspects of the listening task do the listeners find difficult while processing the task?The result reveals that in terms of listening task characteristics,among text characteristics,lexical complexity such as lexical density,syntactic complexity such as mean number of modifiers per noun phrase,discourse complexity such as(All sentences in paragraph)LSA overlap and phonological complexity such as contraction are significantly related to listening task difficulty;text-item overlap characteristics such as attractiveness of the correct option also have a significant relationship with task difficulty.The current study does not find any characteristic related to stem characteristics.Besides,regression analysis finds that the best predictors of listening difficulty are lexical inference in the correct option,mean number of modifiers per noun phrase and lexical overlap in the distractors.Participants' perception of task difficulty is consistent with the actual task difficulty on the whole.However,the perception of new words,linguistic complexity and repetition of important information are not proved to be significantly related to task difficulty.Stimulated recall was conducted to find what aspects of the task cause difficulty and the results were more consistent with the listening performance than with the data obtained from the perception questionnaires.The present study tries to explore the relationship between listening task difficulty and listening task characteristic,with a view to forming a better understanding of the nature of listening task.A greater understanding of the factors influencing task difficulty can assist in the choice of a suitable range of tasks for assessment purposes and also has the potential to influence the way levels of test performance are described.