The Effectiveness of pre-listening activities on listening comprehension in elementary english teaching

• Main Authors: Yang, Chih Yuan, 楊智媛
• Other Authors: Yeh, Chieh Yu
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2009
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/84927961119969528535

碩士 === 國立政治大學 === 英語教學碩士在職專班 === 97 === The purposes of this study were to identify effective teaching activities that improve elementary EFL students’ listening comprehension and to investigate when learners rely on top-down processing, bottom-up processing, and interactive processing. Participants in this study were 76 fifth graders from two classes in an elementary private school in Taipei County, including 52 males and 24 females. One of the two classes was treated with bottom-up pre-listening activities, while the other class was treated with interactive pre-listening activities. A pre-test and a post-test, adopted from the Starter level in the Cambridge Young Learners’ English Test, were implemented before and after a 15-week listening instruction. During the 15-week listening teaching, participants were also required to take a listening quiz after each session of teaching. Scores of the pre-test, post-test and the 15 listening quizzes were calculated by employing statistical measures to investigate the effectiveness of the two types of pre-listening activities, namely interactive and bottom-up pre-listening activities. Further, a questionnaire was administered for the interactive group after the post-test to investigate when learners relied on top-down processing, bottom-up processing and interactive processing. The major findings of the study are: first, results from participants’ listening scores revealed that there was no significant improvement between pre-test and post-test of the two groups although the mean scores of the interactive group were higher than that of the bottom-up group; second, results from the questionnaire indicated that participants employed top-down processing more frequently than bottom-up processing in their listening, while they viewed the understanding of each word (bottom-up processing) as essential to listening comprehension. Suggestions and implications are made at the end of the study.