Enhancing Motivation through Repeated Listening
Year: 2007
Type: article
Abstract: Listening in a foreign language is difficult. Previous research has identified a number of strategies that can result in increased comprehension. One such is repeated listening. The present article describes a study in which 98 Japanese college students of English as a foreign language viewed five videos, rating their comprehension of each video after an initial viewing and again after a second viewing. Self-reported comprehension was found to be significantly better after the second viewing. Participants also reported that repeated viewing was a useful learning practice. Students differ widely in their motivations for studying English. One commonly mentioned motivation is the desire to “communicate ” with English speaking people (Brown, 2004). Communication often requires understanding what is said to one. Yet a substantial number of students are unable to interpret spoken connected English and other foreign language input delivered at normal or artificially slowed rates of delivery, even when they know all of the lexical components (Bonk, 2000; Hirai, 1999). While students may of course experience difficulties in aural comprehension due to vocabulary gaps, research and classroom experience indicate that many students regularly fail to recognize words that they do know and that can be predicted from context by grammatical rules that they can explicitly state (see Wakabayashi, 1997 and Kobayashi 2001, cited in Wakabayashi, 2003). Clearly, knowing words is not sufficient for recognizing them in real-time connected speech. Consequently, the solution to aural processing inefficiencies does not lie in vocabulary development alone. A number of studies have reported increases in comprehension subsequent to repetition of the message,
Author: Robert A. Brown
Language: English
Subfield: Language and Linguistics
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
SDG: Quality education
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W250960557