A Study of the Effect of Various Approaches to Vocabulary Presentation on the Listening Comprehension of University Students in Taiwan

• Main Authors: Yow-ren Chiang, 蔣佑仁
• Other Authors: Johanna E. Katchen
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2001
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/24375554290800725324

碩士 === 國立清華大學 === 外國語文學系 === 89 === The purpose of this study is to examine the effects of various approaches to presenting vocabulary in advance for university students to prepare them in a short time to listen to academic lectures. The review of research indicates that vocabulary is one of the major factors that influences listening comprehension. Ineffective listeners usually stop listening or fail to continue paying attention when they encounter an unknown word or phrase in a listening text. To help ineffective listeners to solve this problem, it seems plausible to give vocabulary or key words to the listeners in advance in order to reduce the possibility of this sudden interruption. Another problem of the listening comprehension is that words change in sounds when they occurred in rapid, connected speech. They do not sound the same as they do when learned in isolation. For this reason, it was interesting to know whether providing new words orally would be more helpful than giving them visually. Furthermore, many studies have shown that learning words in context is far more efficient than learning them in isolation. The question is then raised: “Will it be more beneficial to present new words in context than learning them in isolation for listeners to understand the text?” Considering these factors together, the study was conducted to find out the effect of introducing vocabulary as clues to listening and the most effective way of presenting it. In this study, an experiment was conducted to examine the effect that various approaches of vocabulary presentation have on listening comprehension. The researcher examined four approaches to presenting vocabulary to the listeners before they listened to the texts. In the first approach subjects were given a word list containing the definitions, phonetic symbols, grammatical categories and translation. In the second approach subjects were given the word list and they listened to the pronunciation of these words. In the third approach subjects were given the word list plus a sentence list in which every sentence contained a word that was in the word list. As to the fourth approach, the subjects were given the word list and they listened to the pronunciations of the sentences that contained those words. The researcher randomly selected 203 students from five departments of a major Taiwan university. All of them were students who took the freshman English class. A 5X5 Latin squares design (LS-5) was used to set the order of treatments and texts in a systematic way so that the practice effect, the difficulty level of the texts and the proficiency level of the subjects were balanced. Generally, the result showed that giving vocabulary clues in advance could help the listeners to have a better understanding of the texts. Moreover, context clues did have a better beneficial effect for listening than isolated ones. But visual and sound clues for vocabulary had no different effect on listening comprehension. However, according to the subjects’ reports, which were collected by follow-up questionnaires, the listeners thought that these treatments were helpful to them and they liked them. A long-term study should be conducted to determine whether in the long run these treatments might improve the listeners’ listening comprehension. Finally, some pedagogical implications for instruction on listening comprehension and suggestions for teachers, learners, and textbook designers are provided. The limitations of the study are also discussed and further studies are suggested.