A Contrastive Study Of The Performance In Three Phases Of Listening Between High-Achieving And Low-Achieving Listeners

Under the guidance of three-phase model proposed by Anderson(1995), thisresearch intends to discover what differences listeners of differing listeningcompetence will display in the perceptual processing, parsing and utilizationrespectively. The carrying out of the research will not only make up for the highinadequacy of process-oriented approach to listening investigation, but it can alsocontribute to the construction of a more comprehensive listening theory. Moreimportantly, a thorough search for the fundamental factors explaining the differinglistening competence will ensure a more informed listening instruction by makingsuggestions catering for different listening needs available to students.Concerning the perceptual processing phase which deals with the initial wordrecognition through speech segmentation, the investigation proceeds along the fourmost outstanding factors influcencing the outcome of speech segmentation, observingeither how the real words are detected under various nonsense sound string contextsor how the speech stream is segmented in hardly audible condition. The results showthat both the high-achieving and the low-achieving experimental groups dismiss thepossibility of treating a single consonant as an independent word in speechsegmentation, demonstrating their ability to apply the Possible-Word Constraintmechanism is similar. However, concerning the findings related to three othermechanisms, the research does find widespread differences between two groups tovarious degrees. To be specific, with regard to using the lexical competitionmechanism in speech segmentation, the high-achieving group is found to display clearsigns of showing an advantage over the low-achieving group in speech segmentationwhen the percentages taken up by high frequency words of each group are close.Besides, the research also shows that the two groups are quite different in their abilityof employing phonotactics to facilitate speech segmentation, with the formereffectively utilizing the illegal phone combination to assist the word boundarylocation while the latter showing only the complete strangeness to the idea ofphonotactics. Furthermore, the two groups also demonstrate a marked difference in their ability of finding clues from the English rhythm to facilitate segmentation, withthe high-achieving group already establishing a tendency of regarding the onset ofstressed syllables in speech as the beginning of independent words, while thelow-achieving students’sensitivity to the stressed syllables still being nowhere to beclearly identified.In terms of the pasring phase which is fundamentally concerned with theverb-based syntactic analysis and the extraction and establishment of a correspondingproposition, the research, by adopting the traditional secondary-task method ininvestigating on-line verb processing, finds out that the two groups do not show cleardifference in their verb processing skills, implying that the quality of the parsingphase does not contribute significantly to their listening competence variance.As for the utilization phase in which the ultimate comprehension is achievedthrough the establishment of links between the propositional model already set up andthe relevant schemata in listeners’ mind, the think-aloud method is used to tap intothis phase by looking into how various strategies reflecting the schemata use areresorted to in accomplishing the eventual understanding. The findings demonstratethat the two groups show no fundamental difference in using past listening experienceand the knowledge of language and world, with the stragety types employed by bothgroups are identical and the overall distribution of various strategies generally similar.However, the noticeable difference in respective language knowledge and thecorresponding building up of past listening experience are both found to make theirimpact felt in driving the high-achieving group and the low-achieving one to apply theworld knowledge with somewhat different characteristics, which together contributeto some minor differences in strategy use between the two groups.The relative concentration of differences between the two listening groups on theperceptual processing phase as demonstrated by the afore-mentioned summarizationshows that this phase might play a much more important role than the one envisionedby Anderson in his native language listening comprehension theory. The rise of theperceptual processing and the resulting fall of utilization in terms of importance suggest that the bottom-up and top-town processes might not interact as thoroughly asthey do in native langague understanding. More importantly, the research shows thatfor low-achieving English listeners, while their persistence in enriching listeningvocabulary should continue to be encouraged, the efforts in adapting themselves tothe English speech streams’ acoustic features and English phonological characteristicsare strongly advised to be prioritized.