Assessment of English Listening Needs: A Case Study of Taipei Junior High School Students

• Main Authors: Huang, Hsin Wei, 黃馨葳
• Other Authors: Yu, Ming Chung
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2007
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/25528878804728227572

碩士 === 國立政治大學 === 英語教學碩士在職專班 === 95 === Over the past two decades, a great deal of attention has been devoted to the teaching, learning, and testing of foreign language listening ability. This increased attention is due (at least in part) to the realization of the importance of listening in language learning (Rubin, 1994). While there is an increased research focusing on English listening, there is still much work that needs to be done. The present study, therefore, aimed at assessing the English listening needs of junior high school students in Taipei, investigating their English conversational and academic listening abilities. In addition, the study also examined the differences in listening needs between the students with different levels of English listening proficiency or with different genders. In this study, the questionnaire utilized was based on Richards’ (1983) proposition of the taxonomy of listening skills. It consisted of two major need types, including 51 listening abilities altogether—33 conversational listening abilities and 18 academic ones. The scale of importance and its frequency counting are the ways of measurement and comparison. As for the participants, 208 eighth-graders of all the classes from a junior high school in Taipei took part in this study, with 202 successfully completing the questionnaire form. Finally, t-tests and ANOVA were both used to analyze the quantitative data and to find out the possible patterns of the students’ thoughts in terms of the English listening needs. The study completed, the results first indicated that junior high school students had more needs for academic listening than for conversational one. The most important English listening need was the academic ability to follow different modes of lecturing: spoken, audio, audio-visual, whereas the most need for conversational listening abilities was being able to discriminate among the distinctive sounds of the target language. The results then demonstrated that students with high level of English listening proficiency had significantly more needs for both conversational and academic listening than either the ‘intermediate’ or the ‘low’ proficiency participants. Finally, it was discovered that female listeners, no matter for academic or conversational listening abilities, had more needs than males.