Listening comprehension processes of Japanese students of English as a Second Language (ESL): Does background knowledge really matter

This study investigated how learners' background knowledge of material has an effect on listening comprehension and processes applied during listening comprehension in a second language (L2). This experimental study sought to analyze the relationships among three variables (i.e., listener's background knowledge, listener's type of processing, and listener's language proficiency level).; Subjects in this study were Japanese students studying English as a Second Language (ESL) in an intensive English training program in the United States. They listened to three kinds of recorded American radio news programs.; Subjects were tested for their recall and comprehension of each listening passage. Two kinds of quantitative analysis, repeated measures analysis of variance (ANOVA) and repeated measures analysis of covariance (ANCOVA), were employed to analyze data collected from subjects and to test four hypotheses proposed in this study.; Subjects applied top-down processing for generating content-level information and bottom-up processing for word-level information in their recalling tasks. However, subjects provided with background information of the material prior to listening relied heavily on top-down processing and very little on bottom-up processing. The opposite tendency was prevalent among subjects who did not have access to such information.; Subjects' performance on comprehension tests was also affected by the opportunity to utilize background knowledge. Subjects with background information comprehended better while activating top-down processing.; Subjects' performance in comprehension tests was not affected in any consistent manner by the degree of familiarity subjects had with the listening material, but subjects provided with background knowledge of the material did better than those without such information.; Subjects' proficiency level influenced the scores of the comprehension tests and the production of recall protocols. Regardless of whether or not subjects had background information of the listening material, higher proficiency-level subjects tended to produce more content-level information and less word-level information, while lower proficiency-level subjects showed the opposite tendency. However, subjects with background information outperformed those without such information in the production of content- and word-level information but not in comprehension check tests.; The results of this study added to the understanding of background knowledge in L2 listening comprehension.