The Effects Of Textual Characteristics On Comprehending Second Language News Broadcasts

Listening comprehension plays an indispensable role in daily communication.For English major students,however,keeping basic English conversations is far from enough.They are in pursuit of higher challenge,that is,to be actively involved in international affairs,which can be approached via news broadcasts.In fact,news broadcasts have long been regarded as effective in improving second language learning,for which the comprehension of them is included in the test for English majors.This part,however,has always been reported to be a headache to most test-takers.In view of the above facts,it is highly necessary to explore the factors that cause difficulty in comprehending news broadcasts,to provide pedagogical implications for English practitioners and to ensure more effective use of news broadcasts.Given the above research background and previous research regarding the role of textual characteristics in second language listening,this study first examined the textual characteristics of the news broadcasts in TEM-4 across three levels,lexical,syntactic and discourse,then explored the role of textual characteristics in the listening comprehension of news broadcasts in TEM-4.Thirty news items were extracted from TEM-4 tests ranging from 2005 to 2014.The textual characteristics of the thirty news items were coded with the help of analytical tools.After listening to each news item,the participants were asked to answer a topic familiarity questionnaire and a listening comprehension question.To answer the first research question,comparisons were made between the textual characteristics of news broadcasts in TEM-4 and those of narratives used in a previous study.The lexical characteristics of news broadcasts include higher level of high-frequency words,larger proportion of content words,larger proportion of off-list words but less formulas.As for the syntactic characteristics,most sentences structures used in the news are extension of the basic sentence structure instead of complex sentence with subordinations,and there is a large number of modifiers per noun phrase contributing to longer average sentence length of news in contrast to that of narratives.As for the discourse characteristics,news broadcasts tend to be loosely-knitted in a time sequence with less temporals,and due to higher proportion of additives,there exist higher level of semantic similarity or dissimilarity between sentences in news.The cause and effect relationship among sentences is also vague,and there exist frequent anaphoric references in adjacent sentences in news.To answer the second research question,a series of correlations were run between textual characteristics and the score of listening comprehension.The study found that only discourse-level characteristics,specifically,all connectives and temporals,were related to participants' listening comprehension performance.Considering the textual characteristics of news broadcasts,the researcher fiurther delved into the role of background knowledge and question type in the listening comprehension of news broadcasts and found that the more familiar they were with the topic of the news,the more precise their comprehension would be;and compared with global questions,participants answered local questions with more accuracy.Several pedagogical implications were drawn from the research findings:first,second language teachers are suggested to introduce to students the news broadcast as a cohesive whole instead of a basic lexical and syntactic construct;second,more background knowledge might be accumulated through comprehensive listening of news broadcasts;third,more efforts should be spent on improving students' ability in synthesizing news broadcasts,such as working out the logical relations between sentences by making inference.