How much do learners know about the factors that influence

their listening comprehension?

Christine Goh
National University of Singapore

Abstract

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.

Introduction

Factors that influence listening comprehension have been discussed by

many authors in the fields of both first and second language listening (see for
example, Anderson & Lynch, 1988; Boyle, 1984; Rost, 1990; Samuels, 1984;
Watson & Smeltzer, 1984; Wolvin & Coakely, 1996). In second language
research alone, many studies have been conducted over the last two decades to
determine the effects that specific factors have on the relative success or
failure of learner comprehension during listening. An extensive review of this
area of research by Rubin (1994) identified five factors examined: text, task,
interlocutor, listener and process. Insights on how listening comprehension
may be influenced by these external and internal factors are extremely useful
because cognitive processes that take place during listening comprehension

Hong Kong Journal of Applied Linguistics 4,1 (1999); pp.17–42

| 18 C. Goh
are not normally observable directly. Thus, information on factors that might
enhance or hinder these processes can help teachers to better understand their
learners’ needs and problems.

The importance of such insights was one reason that motivated the study
(Goh, 1998a) on which this article is based . One of my aims was to
investigate the knowledge that a group of Chinese ESL learners had about
listening comprehension. My purpose was not just to identify factors which
influenced the learners’ listening comprehension, but also to find out to what
extent the learners themselves were aware of the effect of these factors. In
other words, I wanted to uncover the learners’ metacognitive awareness about
second language listening1. Metacognition, or what learners know about their
learning processes, is said to have an effect on the outcome of learning. The
literature on learning has convincingly argued and demonstrated that
metacognition is an important dimension of thinking which can enhance
learning (see, for example, Garner, 1987; Marzono, Hughes, Jones & Idol,
1990; Jones, Presseien, Rankin & Suhor, 1988; Pressley, Harris & Guthrie,
1992; Weinstein, Goetz & Alexander, 1988). In view of this, I also wanted to
determine whether the amount of knowledge that my ESL students had about
listening was in any way linked to their listening ability.

The theoretical framework I adopted for this study was John Flavell’s
metacognitive knowledge, which he defined as “that segment of your (a
child’s, an adult’s) stored world knowledge that has to do with people as
cognitive creatures and with their diverse cognitive tasks, goals, actions and
experiences” Flavell (1979, p. 906). Flavell further distinguished three types
of metacognitive knowledge: person, task and strategy. These refer to the
specific knowledge that individuals have about themselves as learners, the
learning tasks they have to undertake, and the strategies that are most
appropriate for accomplishing these tasks. Flavell’s framework of
metacognitive knowledge has been successfully applied to language learning
by Wenden (1991).

The type of metacognitive knowledge discussed in this article is task

knowledge, that is the students’ knowledge about the purpose, the demands
and the nature of learning to listening to English. The main study has revealed
three types of task knowledge: factors influencing listening comprehension,
methods for developing listening ability and the nature of second language

1
Some early findings have been published in Goh (1997).
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