Relationship between Listening Comprehension Strategy Use and Listening Comprehension Proficiency

This study explores the relationship between students’ listening comprehension strategy use and their listening comprehension proficiency with regard to the group, level, and degree of strategy use. Forty-four university students of an English Language teaching department comprised the study population. Three listening comprehension tests were given to participants with two-week intervals to measure their listening comprehension proficiency. To measure the students’ listening comprehension strategy use, a listening comprehension strategy inventory developed by the researcher was used. Data analysis showed a positive correlation between the level of listening comprehension strategy use and listening comprehension proficiency. When different groups of listening comprehension strategy use of learners were taken into account, there was a statistically significant difference between the students’ listening comprehension achievements in favor of the group with high metacognitive strategy use.     

A Content-Based Approach to Teaching and Testing Listening Skills to Grade 5 EFL Learners

English education has been officially incorporated into elementary-level education in Taiwan since 2001, with the key objective of reinforcing pupils’ oral communication in class. Although oral interaction involves a degree of listening input from interlocutors, listening has unfortunately remained a marginalized area in Taiwanese elementary education. Little is known about how to improve young learners’ listening comprehension and listening skills in Taiwanese contexts. The present study was carried out with 52 11-year-old elementary school pupils in Taiwan. An English course was designed to integrate pupils’ listening skills into a content-based course with a series of tourism-related topics. The results showed that the teaching of listening skills could be integrated into the content-based course and certain listening skills were greatly improved. Also, the study has implications for designing a topic-based course for teaching and testing listening skills, as well as for developing listening and speaking abilities in young EFL learners.     

Listening Comprehension in English Learning

Listening comprehension remains one of the least understood processes in language learning. This paper discusses the specific elements, which influence students' listening comprehension in learning English.     

Neuro Linguistic Programming and Listening Behavior

Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) was employed in this study to determine whether its application would enhance the listening skills of subjects. Messages based on NLP were presented to the subjects. The messages that were presented in the auditory format proved to be most persuasive for the recipients. These results supported the recommendations of previous research. Implications for further research are presented.     

Nonverbal Attentive Behavior and Listening Comprehension

The purpose of this study was to investigate the role nonverbal attending behaviors play in listening skills and Comprehension. Nonverbal attending behaviors of 112 subjects were videotaped while they watched a humorous videotape. Measures of listeners' comprehension were collected on a 14-item multiple-choice questionnaire. One-half of the subjects was given the opportunity to take notes. The data were analyzed by t-tests and a Pearson correlation. Results indicated that those who exhibited more attending behaviors scored higher on the comprehension test than those who did not. The opportunity to take notes did not enhance comprehension scores.     

The Influence of Short-term memory in Listening Comprehension

Short-term memory plays an essential role in listening comprehension.There are so many factors influence students to maintain effective short-term memory and the information extraction from short-term memory in listening comprehension.This paper explains some ways of improving listening ability,which emphatically point out how to extend short-term memory.     

The Effects of Cultural Familiarity and Question Preview Type on the Listening Comprehension of L2 Learners at the Secondary Level

We examined the effect of cultural familiarity and question-preview types on the listening comprehension of L2 learners. The results showed that the participants who received the full question-preview format scored higher than those receiving either the answer-option preview or question-stem preview, despite a statistically nonsignificant difference across the three previewing activities. In addition, the participants exposed to diverse cultural texts did not perform differently in their comprehension score. The findings suggest that the use of visual cues and key-vocabulary instruction in both texts may have compromised the positive psychological value of question previewing in enhancing comprehension of the unfamiliar text.     

The Influence of Short-term memory in Listening Comprehension

Short-term memory plays an essential role in listening comprehension.There are so many factors influence students to maintain effective short-term memory and the information extraction from short-term memory in listening comprehension.This paper explains some ways of improving listening ability,which emphatically point out how to extend short-term memory.     

高职英语专业学生听力元认知策略使用情况分析

采用定量分析方法,调查了深圳信息职业技术学院103名英语专业学生的听力元认知策略使用情况。探索性因子分析得出4个影响因子,依使用频率由高到低为:选择注意、猜测联想、方法探索和自我评估。描述性统计分析结果表明,高职英语专业学生听力元认知策略的整体使用频率偏低。     

Co-Shaping Metacognitive Awareness and Developing Listening Comprehension through Process-Based Instruction

This study examined the effect of metacognitive process-based and product-based instruction on enhancing listening comprehension and metacognitive awareness. Two classes of high-beginner English as a foreign language learners were randomly assigned to two groups: product-based (n = 30) process-based (n = 30). Both before and after eight instructional sessions, listening comprehension and metacognitive awareness were measured. Process-based group, then, followed a pedagogical sequence in each session (Vandergrift, 2004), providing opportunities for dialogue about the listening process and the strategies involved, whereas the product-based group was not engaged in dialogue nor did the group reflect upon listening strategies. Results indicated that the process-based group significantly outperformed the product-based one in terms of gains in listening comprehension and metacognitive awareness. Moreover, the microgenetic analysis of the dialogic interactions of the process-based group presented some evidence showing how the students co-shaped metacognitive awareness. This article concludes with discussing the findings, presenting some pedagogical implications, and sketching out areas for further research.     

Examining the Role of Concentration,Vocabulary and Self-concept in Listening and Reading Comprehension

Listening is regarded as a key requirement for successful communication and is fundamentally linked to other language skills. Unlike reading, it requires both hearing and processing information in real-time. We therefore propose that the ability to concentrate is a strong predictor of listening comprehension. Using structural equation modeling, concentration was found to be a strong predictor of listening comprehension in a sample of 345 sixth graders in Switzerland. In contrast, the ability to concentrate did not predict successful reading comprehension. The most important predictor of both listening and reading comprehension was vocabulary.     

大学英语听力焦虑情绪形成原因及应对策略

大学英语听力焦虑情绪是大学生英语学习中存在的较为普遍的现象,本文通过分析大学生英语听力课堂存在的问题,总结了学生在听力过程中焦虑情绪的形成原因,并提出了相应对策,旨在提高学生英语听力水平和提高大学英语教学水平。     

The Effect of Activating Metacognitive Strategies on the Listening Performance and Metacognitive Awareness of EFL Students

This study investigates the effect of activating metacognitive strategies on the listening performance of English as a foreign language (EFL) university students and explores the impact of such strategies on their metacognitive awareness of the listening task. The participants were N = 50 students of English literature at the state university of Qom, Iran. After screening the participants from among 60 students, they were randomly assigned to the experimental and control groups. The experimental group (n = 25) received the metacognitive strategy instruction based on the models proposed by Vandergrift and Tafaghodtari (2010), while the control group (n = 25) received just the listening input with no strategy instruction. The listening module of the International English Language Testing System (IELTS) was utilized to evaluate the listening performance of the participants in both groups in pretests and posttests, and the Metacognitive Awareness Listening Questionnaire (MALQ) instrument was applied to measure the metacognitive awareness of the treatment group before and after the treatment. The results of the IELTS test revealed that the experimental group significantly outperformed the control group on the posttest and according to the analysis of the MALQ instrument there was a significant improvement in the students’ level of metacognitive awareness after strategy instruction. The interview results in the discussion section also supported the findings and shed more light on the details.     

Patterns of Alcohol and Marijuana Use at School

The problem of adolescent substance use has been examined extensively. Beyond simple prevalence estimates, however, little research has been conducted on substance use in the school context. The present investigation was an in‐depth study of students' attitudes and behaviors regarding alcohol and marijuana use during the school day. Based on a representative sample of 1123 high school students, this study assessed the frequency of alcohol and marijuana use at school among demographic subgroups, the accessibility of drugs in school, and students' perceived consequences of being caught using drugs in school. The results showed that male and Hispanic students had higher levels of drug use at school than female and white students, respectively; that school drug use increased with age, and that alcohol and marijuana were easily obtained and used on school grounds. A large percentage of students were not aware of the specific actions taken in their schools to punish drug use. The need for additional research on school‐related drug use is emphasized.     

From Perception and Knowledge to Classroom Practice: Teaching Listening Comprehension to Setswana Speakers of English in Junior Schools in Botswana

The study investigated whether teachers’ knowledge and positive perception of listening contribute to its teaching in junior secondary schools in Botswana. Using an observation schedule, data were collected from four schools in the Gaborone, Botswana, area. The main finding of the study is that knowledge of listening does not translate into good classroom practice. Among other things, the teachers neither taught listening communicatively nor followed the necessary stages in its teaching—pre-, while, and postlistening. This mismatch between knowledge and perception on the one hand and classroom practice on the other needs to be addressed in order for listening to be taught effectively in Botswana’s junior secondary schools.     

Iranian EFL teachers’ beliefs and perspectives on incorporating culture in EFL classes

ABSTRACT

Researcher and teacher beliefs towards culture and teaching culture have changed over the last decade. Nowadays, the main objective of language teachers has shifted from teaching communicative competence to intercultural communicative competence. The purpose of this study was to investigate the beliefs and perspectives of a number of Iranian EFL teachers towards incorporating culture teaching into their classrooms. More specifically, the study strived to reveal what Iranian EFL teachers thought about the concept of culture, what cultural information they focused on in their classes, and what obstacles they believed should be removed in order to allocate more time to culture teaching in their classes. The non-random purposive sampling method was used to select the participants for this study. A total number of 10 Iranian EFL teachers with a PhD degree in Applied Linguistics participated in this study. Data were collected through a semi-structured interview and a closed-ended questionnaire based on a 5-point scale. The main finding of this study indicated that even though the Iranian EFL teachers favoured including cultural information in their classes, a number of obstacles prevented them from teaching culture in their English classes. Implications for further study have been provided in the article.     

Language Use and Violence: Assessing the Relationship Between Linguistic Context and Macrolevel Violence

Scholars have produced a sizable body of research assessing the macrolevel links between immigration and crime. However, researchers have given far less attention to related questions about the effects of language use on aggregate levels of violence. The current study addresses this gap in research by exploring the ways that patterns of language use—specifically, language heterogeneity and Spanish‐language concentration—are related to year 2010 serious violent crime rates for nearly 2,900 census places across the United States. Results of our analysis reveal that linguistic heterogeneity is associated with increased violence and that this relationship is stronger in disadvantaged contexts. In contrast, Spanish‐language concentration appears to be protective against violence and mitigates the violence‐generating effects of structural disadvantage, net of immigration and other macrostructural characteristics. Implications of these findings for research on immigration, communities and crime, and related theoretical perspectives on immigrant revitalization and macrostructural theories of crime are discussed.     

National Income, Inequality and Global Patterns of Cigarette Use

Declining tobacco use in high-income nations and rising tobacco use in low- and middle-income nations raises questions about the sources of worldwide patterns of smoking. Theories posit a curvilinear influence of national income based on the balance of affordability and health-cost effects. In addition, however, economic inequality, gender inequality and government policies may moderate the rise and fall in smoking prevalence with national income. This study tests these arguments using aggregate data for 145 nations and measures of smoking prevalence circa 2000. The results show nonlinear effects of national income for males that take the form of an inverted U, but show linear effects for females. They also show non-additive effects of economic inequality for males that moderate both the rise and decline of smoking with national income and non-additive effects of gender equality for females that moderate the positive effect of national income.     

Engaging Students in a Virtual Classroom: The Use of Bulletin Boards in Teaching and Learning for Chinese Learners

ABSTRACT

Chinese learners, being influenced by Confucian Heritage Culture (CHC), exhibit unique perceptions and behaviors in a web-based learning environment, such as passivity in expressing opinions and uncertainty about their learning without a teacher's assurance. Findings in this paper reflect such influences in a web-based social policy course for Chinese students which made extensive use of bulletin board discussion. In addition, their involvement in it is associated with how they feel about teachers' concern about their learning and whether expectations and assignments are clear. The paper recommends ways to improve web-based teaching and to facilitate Chinese learners in this new learning environment.