The Effects Of Background Knowledge And Language Proficiency Level On EFL Students' Listening Comprehension

This study investigated how learners' background knowledge of material and listener's proficiency level has an effect on listening comprehension and processes applied during listening comprehension in a second language (L2).A review of the literature shows that recent language comprehension studies have been influenced strongly by cognitive views of language acquisition and learning theories. The literature review also shows that schema and listening comprehension have a significant and interesting theoretical relationship. Because L2 listening comprehension is the least-studied area in language comprehension, there should be more studies exploring schema theory in L2 listening comprehension.Subjects in this study were English major students selected from the Nanchang Institute of Technology, where a total of 150 subjects involved in this experimental study. They listened to four listening materials well-chosen by the writer, which consist of two familiar topic passages and two unfamiliar topic passages.Subjects were tested for their comprehension of each listening passage by two ways: twenty-items multiple choices, their written recall protocols, in addition, a semi-structured interview data. Both quantitative and qualitative data were employed to analyze four hypotheses proposed in this study.The findings showed that both background knowledge and language proficiency have an effect in subject's listening comprehension. 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 word-level information, while lower proficiency-level subjects showed the opposite tendency. Meanwhile,subjects outperformed in doing familiar passages than in doing unfamiliar ones in comprehension check tests. Subjects' performance on comprehension tests was also affected by the opportunity to utilize background knowledge. Subjects with background information tended to activate top-down processing,subjects without background knowledge tended to apply bottom-up processing. However, during the two cases, high proficiency-level always performed better than low proficiency-level. In addition, one striking finding of this study is that the results of two-way ANOVA seems a little contradictory to the qualitative data of semi-structured interview , which this can be explained from the subjects'on-line processing characteristics and their subconscious use of long-term memory knowledge.