How Much Do Learners Know about the Factors That Influence Their Listening Comprehension

This article discusses factors which influence learner listening comprehension and examines the extent of awareness of these factors among a group of Chinese ESL learners. Data were collected through small group interviews and learner diaries. Twenty factors were identified and these were categorised under five characteristics: text, listener, speaker, task, and environment. Many of the factors identified were related to text and listener characteristics. Five factors were reported by more than two-thirds of the forty language learners who participated in the study. The factors in order of frequency of mention were: vocabulary, prior knowledge, speech rate, type of input and speaker’s accent. To find out whether the degree of awareness about factors influencing comprehension was in any way linked to listening ability, two groups of learners were compared. A majority of the high-ability listeners reported twelve factors whereas the low-ability group reported only four. While the high-ability listeners were aware of the effects of text characteristics, they also saw listening as an interactive process in which both the listener and the speaker shared a responsibility for meaning construction. The low-ability listeners’ view of listening comprehension, on the other hand, appeared to be predominantly text-oriented.

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