A Study Of The Effect Of High School Students’ Word-level Skills On Listening Comprehension Performance

As for the complicated process of reading comprehension, Perfetti proposes interpretational model with multi-factors--lexical quality hypothesis--from the perspective of component skills analysis to explore the impact of representations of word-level skills on native English speakers’ reading comprehension level. In lexical quality hypothesis, readers’ phonology, orthography and semantic processing skill are circularly interacted with their reading comprehension performance and phonological processing skill is the core of word identification in reading comprehension. Chinese scholars find that undergraduates’word-level skills have consequences for both reading and listening comprehension performance. Nevertheless, scholars rarely focus on three constituents of word-level skills simultaneously regardless of the effect of high school students’ word-level skills on listening comprehension performance.Given all that, this study targeted at 47 students of a senior high school in Yangzhou, focusing on three components of lexical skills, phonology, orthography and semantic processing skill, to answer such questions:(1) What is the present situation of high school students’ English word-level skills? (2) What is the relationship between high school students’ English word-level skills and listening comprehension performance? (3) What is the difference in word-level skills between skilled and less skilled listeners? To this end, this thesis tested participants’ word-level skills, involving phonology, orthography and semantic and listening comprehension performance based on Perfetti’s lexical quality hypothesis and Anderson’s three-phase model of listening comprehension. In word-level skills tests, phonological processing skill test was composed of syllable test designed by Swan and Goswami (1997) and onset-rime and phoneme test designed by Hulme et al (2002). Orthographic processing test adopted two non-words distinguish tasks from an orthographic research of Cunningham et al (2001). Semantic processing skill test imitated the experiment conducted by Wu Jianshe (2012) to adopt Controlled Active Vocabulary Test designed by Nation (1999). The listening comprehension test came from daily practice of the senior high school in Yangzhou.According to data collection and analysis, the research yields the following major findings:Firstly, there are differences in three representations of word-level skills for high school students. The accuracy of phonological skill test (60.63%) ranks the first, followed by semantic processing test (52.39%) and the accuracy of orthographic processing test is the lowest (49%). In phonological skill test, accuracy of phoneme test is the highest, next is syllable test, and onset-rime test is the last one. In semantic processing skill test, accuracy of 2000-level words test towers over accuracy of 3000-level words test. As for orthographic skill test, accuracy of pseudo-words task is higher than pseudo-homophone task.Secondly, high school students’ word-level skills have significant effect on listening comprehension performance, which are relatively more dependent on semantic processing skill in listening. Correlation analysis indicates that high school students’phonological processing skill (P=0.041) and semantic processing skill (P=0.006) are correlated to their listening comprehension performance. In addition, stepwise regression analysis reveals that phonological (P=0.035) and semantic processing skill (P=0.006) could account for high school students’ performance of listening comprehension and when both phonology and semantic serve as predictor variables, they can predict 20.2% grades in listening comprehension.Thirdly, skilled listeners are superior to less skilled listeners in three representations of word-level skills and phonological processing skill is the discrimination between skilled and less skilled listeners. Independent-samples T test reveals that there is no statistically significant difference in orthographic (P=0.246) and semantic (P=0.096) processing skill tests between skilled and less skilled listeners, while the significant difference exists in phonological (P=0.038) test. And then further study indicates that there is a significant difference in syllable test between skilled and less skilled listeners.The major findings generated from this study may have some pedagogical implications. Firstly, teachers should raise the overall stature of high school students’word-level skills in daily teaching and drill their phonological processing skill consciously, especially with the training of syllabification for less skilled listeners. Secondly, teachers should pay due attention to orthographic skill, like summarizing rules of letter groups to improve high school students’ processing power of the grapheme-phoneme correspondence and non-correspondence phenomenon. Thirdly, teachers should try to cultivate students’habit of memorizing words through phonology and enhance the coherence of representations of a word so as to avoid asynchrony in retrieval components of vocabulary in listening due to overreliance on semantic memory. Meanwhile, students should be active participators in various vocabulary training. As for phonological skill, high school students should strengthen their ability in syllabification and phoneme identification. Regarding to orthographic skill, students are bound to enhance their ability to handle the grapheme-phoneme non correspondence phenomenon. In semantic skill, students facing with failure in vocabulary retrieval in listening are supposed to improve their breadth of vocabulary and coherence of representations of words respectively based on their vocabulary level.