摘 要

1. Introduction 1

2. Literature Review 3

2.1 Theoretical issues 3

2.1.1 Listening comprehension 3

2.1.2 Task type and listening 3

2.1.3 Text type and listening 5

2.1.4 Interplay of task type and text type 6

2.2 Empirical studies 7

2.2.1 Studies on the effects of text type on listening comprehension 7

2.2.2 Studies on the effects of task type on listening comprehension 8

2.2.3 Studies on the effects of task type and text type on listening comprehension 9

2.2.4 Limitations of previous studies 9

3. Methodology 11

3.1 Research questions 11

3.2 Subjects 11

3.3 Materials and instruments 11

3.4 Listening test and questionnaire survey 12

3.5 Data analysis 12

4. Results and Discussion 14

4.1 Results 14

4.1.1 Results of listening test 14

4.1.2 Results of questionnaire 16

4.2 Discussion 18

4.2.1 Effects of task type on listening comprehension 18

4.2.2 Effects of text type on listening comprehension 19

4.2.3 Effects of task type and text type on listening comprehension 20

5. Conclusion 21

5.1 Major findings 21

5.2 Implications 21

5.3 Limitations and suggestions for future study 22

References 23

Appendix 26

Listening comprehension test 26

Questionnaire 29

Acknowledgement

As I dotted the last punctuation of this thesis, a number of people to whom I had owed my thanks came to my mind. I avail myself of this opportunity to express my sincere gratitude to all who have given me a great deal of help and encouragement in my preparation for this thesis.

I am extremely grateful to my supervisor, Professor Han Yawen for his consistent help in drafting, constructing and revising this thesis. In writing the thesis, he provided me with a great number of books which I was badly in need of. Without his encouragement and instruction, the completion of this thesis would be impossible.

I also want to express my thanks to all the professors in the foreign language department. With their guidance, I open up my eyes and broaden my horizon, thus I gradually acquire the ability to work on my thesis.

Abstract

This study aims to investigate how different texts (conversation, passage, news broadcast) and tasks (multiple-choice task, short-answer task) affect EFL learners’ listening comprehension performance. To be specific, this study addresses the following questions:

1. Does text type affect college students’ English listening comprehension performance?

2. Does task type affect college students’ English listening comprehension performance?

3. Does the effect of different text types on college students’ listening comprehension performance vary according to the difference of task type?

In this study, a total of 56 first-year English majors from two intact classes in Nanjing Tech University were chosen as subjects. All the subjects took a listening test under six conditions:

Conversational text with multiple-choice tasks, conversational text with short-answer tasks, passage with multiple-choice tasks, passage with short-answer tasks, news broadcast with multiple-choice tasks, and news broadcast with short-answer tasks. Texts in the listening test were all extracted from TEM-4. All the subjects were gathered into an audio-visual classroom and completed the same test. After the listening test, the scores of each subject in each part of the test paper were calculated and analyzed by SPSS. 22.0.

A 2×3 factorial analysis results reveal the following findings:

1. Text type has significant effects on students’ listening comprehension performance, which means students’ listening comprehension performance is affected by different text types. The results reveal that students perform best in conversations, followed by passages, and perform worst in news broadcasts.

2. Task type has significant effects on students’ listening comprehension performance. It indicates that students’ performance in listening comprehension tests varies with the change of task type. The results show that students perform better in multiple-choice tasks than in short-answer tasks.

3. The interplay of task type and text type was found to have significant influence on students’ listening comprehension performance, namely the effects of different text types on students’ listening comprehension performance vary according to different task types.

Key words: listening comprehension; text type; task type

中文摘要

本研究旨在探讨不同文本类型（对话，短文，新闻报道）和任务类型（多项选择，简答）如何影响以英语为第二语言的英语学习者的听力理解成绩。具体来说，本研究主要解决以下问题：

1.文本类型是否对英语专业大学生的听力理解有影响？

2.问题类型是否对英语专业大学生的听力理解有影响？

3.文本类型对英语专业大学生听力理解的作用是否受问题类型的影响？

本研究的受试为南京工业大学英语专业的56名大一学生，他们来自两个自然班。所有受试做了一份相同的听力测试卷，试卷包含以下六种文本与任务的搭配情况：对话文本和多项选择题，对话文本和简答题，短文和多项选择题，短文和简答题，新闻和多项选择题，新闻和简答题。实验所用听力试卷中的所有听力文本都摘于英语专业四级考试真题卷。所有受试集中在一间语音教室完成听力测试。测试结束之后，作者统计了每位受试在试卷每个部分的得分情况，并通过统计分析软件SPSS. 22.0对其进行分析。

通过2×3因子分析，得出以下结论：

1.文本类型对学生的听力理解成绩有显著影响。表明学生的听力理解成绩受不同文本类型的影响。结果发现学生在对话部分表现最好，短文部分次之，新闻部分最差。

2.任务类型对学生的听力理解成绩有显著影响。表明学生的听力理解成绩受不同任务类型的影响。结果发现学生在多项选择题中的表现好于简答题中的表现。

3.任务类型和文本类型对学生的听力理解成绩有显著的交互作用。结果表明不同文本类型对学生的听力理解成绩的作用与任务类型有关。

关键词：听力理解 文本类型 任务类型

1. Introduction

As one of the most widely used language in the world, English has been put to a significant position for decades in China. Admittedly, listening, speaking, reading and writing are the four crucial skills of a language. Among which, listening, as has been confirmed by many researchers, is the most significant one. For example, Nunan(1998) pointed out that more than half of the time that students spend on a foreign language should be devoted to listening. However, most Chinese English teachers and learners put much more emphasis on English reading and writing than on listening and speaking. As a result, there are still strong barriers that interfere in Chinese college students’ listening comprehension, although none of those students have learned English for less than six years.

In recent years, much research has been conducted on L2 listening at home and abroad. Much has been done on the effects of text type on L2 reading and listening comprehension. For instance, Chu Xiaoyan (2013) studied on the effects of text difficulty, text type and topic familiarity on L2 reading comprehension and drew a conclusion that text type had no main effects on L2 reading comprehension. Lin Zhou (2002) found during his research that type of text was one of the major factors affecting reading comprehension. Mehmet Kilic amp; Berrin Uckun (2013) discovered that types of listening texts had influence on listening comprehension anxiety. Feng Yin (2014) concluded that text type had great influence on listening comprehension. Considerable research also has been done in terms of the effect of task type on L2 reading and listening comprehension. For example, Zhang Ling (2001) tested and confirmed one of her primary hypothesis that task type affected listening comprehension of Chinese English learners in a significant way. Hooshang Khoshsima (2014) researched on the impact of task types on listening comprehension of Iranian intermediate EFL learners, and found that the learners outperformed in the two tasks note-taking and completing than in the other three tasks matching, selecting and role-playing. The results indicated there was no significant difference among matching tasks, selecting tasks and role-playing tasks, neither was there any significant difference between note-taking tasks and completing tasks.

In summary, those previous researches focused on either the effects of text type or task type on reading or listening comprehension, rather than the interacting effects of text type and task type on listening comprehension. Also, there are contradictory findings as for the effects of some variables in those previous researches. The current study therefore investigated the combining influence of text type and task type on listening comprehension and examined related findings of previous researches.

2. Literature Review

This chapter begins with an introduction of text type and task type that were investigated in the current study and some other related theoretical items, followed by a review of previous empirical studies in the same or relative fields, and ends with limitations in previous studies.

2.1 Theoretical issues

2.1.1 Listening comprehension

Researchers (e.g., River, 1981) estimated that people listen twice as much as they speak, four times as much as they read, and five times as much as they write. However, listening should be distinguished from listening comprehension. The difference between listening and listening comprehension mainly lies in the motivation and the process. ‘Listening’ means just listening to the message, it’s unnecessary for listeners to interpret or make any response to the text during the listening process, thus listening can be aimlessly, while ‘listening comprehension’ is much different, the process of listening comprehension includes meaningful interactivity, in this process listeners obtain useful information from the auditory cues and activate the existing knowledge stored in their memory to better understand and comprehend what they heard(O’Malley Chamot, amp; Kupper, 1990).