temporary information

Name: 許珮綺

Number: 91XXXXXX

Harley, Birgit. (2000). Listening strategies in ESL: Do age and L1 make a difference? TESOL Quarterly, 34(4), 769-777.

SUMMARY

l          Study rationale:

l          Study questions: Would the Polish-speaking students of ESL at three different age levels most strongly influenced by prosodic or syntactic cues in repeating the special part of the sentence they heard?

Method

l          Participants: Polish-speaking students at three different age levels who had lived in Canada for 1-4 years, including 26 students in Grades 10-12 and 9 students in Grade 7-8

l          Instrument: interview

l          Procedure: Each participant had an individual appointment with a Polish-speaking research assistant in a quiet room at school and performed the relevant task: They listened to thirty audiotape sentences in English and repeated a "special part" of each sentence.

l          Analysis: For most of the sentences, the part to be repeated was unambiguously the subject of the sentence. For instance, when hearing the sentence “most of my friends like school”, most students would repeat “”most of my friends. However, ten interspersed ambiguous sentences in which prosodic and syntactic cues to sentence structure are in conflict generated different results. For example, the students heard the sentence “the new teachers watch baseball on TV,” in which “the new teachers” is the subject. But the prosody of the sentence provided the student with conflicting information, as “the new teachers watch” had been taken form another sentence “the new teacher’s watch has stopped”. Thus, the student might be affected by this subtle difference. That is, they would repeat “the new teachers watch” as the subject of the sentence “the new teachers watch baseball on TV,” which was in fact a subject plus a verb.

l          Result: Results showed that on the ambiguous sentences, the Polish-speaking students in Grades 7-8 and 10-12 performed comparably to the Chinese speaking students at similar grade levels in previous study. In other words, these Polish-speaking learners of English were just as likely as Chinese-speaking learners to attend to the prosody of the sentence they heard rather than focus on grammatical cues to its structure.

REFLECTION

l          Strength: The implication of this study is to address the importance of prosodic patterns in oral English. Thus, as instructors, we can put emphasis on the teaching of prosodic patterns of oral English to enhance students’ listening comprehension rather than focus on the syntactic structure of sentences.

l          Weakness: In real communication, listeners would usually listen to a context rather than isolated sentences. Thus, in this study, the researcher’s use of isolated sentences to test whether participants’ reaction is inclined to prosodic or syntactic is not quite authentic. Moreover, the number of participants is quite few, which affects its validity. Besides, the researcher keeps comparing his study to the previous ones. Though the statistics or results between different researches are not incomparable, the designs of researches are different, so they’d be better put in the same study to avoid deviation.

l          Suggestion: This study shows no difference between the groups of different ages. However, this may result from the condition that the discrepancy of their age is not quite large (between Grades7-8 and Grades10-12). So I think groups of larger age discrepancy can be included in the study.