The Relationship Between Taiwanese EFL Young Learners’ Phonological Awareness and Listening Comprehension

• Main Authors: Ai-jen Lin, 林愛偵
• Other Authors: Dr. Chuen-Teng Huang
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2010
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/80974659476129700542

碩士 === 國立彰化師範大學 === 兒童英語研究所 === 98 === Phonology has been viewed as an initial key component to understand auditory messages in English. That is to say, a listener has to segment the continuous stream of speech into constituents, for example, distinguish the sounds and intonation patterns. The relationship between segmental phonology and suprasegmental phonology is hierarchically related (Pennington, 1996), both of which play an important role in learners’ listening ability. There are numerous studies (e.g., Karmiloff & Karmiloff-Smith, 2001; Nazzi, Betroncini & Mehler, 1998) and theories which (e.g.,Anderson-Hsieh, Johnson & Koehler, 1992; Taylor, 1993; Kuo, Kung & Pierce, 1997)indicate suprasegmental phonology has a positive effect on a learners’ listening comprehension; however, few empirical studies investigate the aspect of segmental phonology and subjects’ listening comprehension. Hence, the purpose of the study was aimed to investigate the relationship between EFL young learners’ phonological awareness, in the aspects of both segment and suprasegment, and listening comprehension. The participants in the study were 106 fifth-grade elementary school students from three intact classes. The subjects are required to take the phonological awareness test and listening comprehension test respectively. The phonological awareness test was divided into two major parts, the features of segmental and suprasegmental, to examine subjects’ segmental and suprasegmental phonological processing ability. The listening comprehension test, adapted from Cambridge Young Learners English Test,was to elicit the subjects’ actual listening proficiency of understanding common social and situational context. The subjects’ scores of those two tests were calculated. Further, statistical measure with Pearson Product-Moment Correlation in SPSS (version15.0) was employed to find out if there are any correlations between the subjects’ phonological awareness and their listening comprehension. Results from this study showed that the subjects’ phonological awareness had a significant correlation with their listening comprehension. As for the two aspects of phonology, both segmental phonology and suprasegmental phonology had significant correlation with the subjects’ listening comprehension. This study may therefore be of some help in understanding the relationships between the two aspects of phonology and listening comprehension of EFL learners. Key words: segmental phonology, suprasegmental phonology, phonological awareness, listening comprehension