The Role of Background Knowledge in Foreign Language Listening Comprehension
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| Title | The Role of Background Knowledge in Foreign Language Listening Comprehension |
| Authors | |
| Abstract | The role of background knowledge and topic familiarity in second language reading comprehension has been the subject of much research. Although it is assumed that learners will react similarly to listening, it should be remembered that, they are not entirely parallel skills, and most importantly, relevant researches provided conflicting results in different contexts. Besides, there is no report of such a study with Iranian learners of a foreign language. Thus, this paper reports research that describes the effects of topic familiarity on the foreign language listening comprehension, and makes an attempt to find out whether proficiency level affects recall measures of listening comprehension. To this end, an experiment was conducted with 56 students studying English at one of Iranian universities. The results of the between-within analysis of variance clearly indicated that topic familiarity affected the scores of recall measures and the course-level groups revealed a consistent increase in comprehension scores. There was also no interaction effect: subjects regardless of their level scored higher on the familiar passage. The researcher has also left some relevant issues to some further research at the end of the paper. |
| Publisher | ACADEMY PUBLISHER |
| Date | 2011-10-01 |
| Source | Theory and Practice in Language Studies Vol 1, No 10 (2011) |
| Rights | Copyright © ACADEMY PUBLISHER - All Rights Reserved.To request permission, please check out URL: http://www.academypublisher.com/copyrightpermission.html. |