What strategy do less proficient learners employ in listening comprehension: A reappraisal of bottom-up and top-down pro

1. What strategy do less proficient learners employ in listening comprehension?: A reappraisal of bottom-up and top-down processingNobuko osadaWaseda Universityjoo-youn wee

2. 3.3. Listening passages Four passages were chosen from Hill(1980) : two passages for the idea unit analysis and the others for the analysis by local and global question type. Each passage was examined with the software programmed for acoustic analysis Multi-Speech, Model 3700 (KAY Elemetrics Corp.)

3. 3.4. Comprehension measures two different measures - the idea unit analysis by a free written recall task - the analysis by local and global question type ? local questions reflect the local coherence strategy (bottom-up processing skills) ? global questions reflect the global coherence strategy (top-down processing skills)

4. 3.4.1. The idea unit analysis In a free written recall task, the participants were asked to write in their native language everything they could recall, immediately after they heard the passage. To measure mainly an aspect of bottom-up processing. If Low-level idea units are dominant in recall protocols, it will indicate that bottom-up processing overwhelms top-down processing during comprehension. Idea unit analysis has been used extensively in reading research and is becoming a common measure of comprehension in listening research(Schmidt-Rinehart, 1994).

5. 3.4.2. The analysis by local and global  question type They were open-ended questions and could be answered in either Japanese( native language) or English (target language) � most of the participants chose Japanese. The local questions : required the participants to locate details, understand single words. The global questions : required them to synthesize information, draw conclusions and focus on cause and effect relationships as well as on inferences. ?harder to answer than local question

6. 3.5. Procedures The study was conducted during a regularly scheduled class session. The participants were assigned one task in each class, so that it took four weeks to complete all the tasks. After the second playing ? in a free written recall task, they wrote what they could remember. ? in a local and global question task, they answered the questions on the answer sheet in Japanese

7. 3.6. The research hypotheses Empirically thinking, it is hypothesized that less proficient Japanese EFL learners rely heavily on bottom-up processing. Four hypotheses (the first two are related to the idea unit analysis and the others are related to the analysis by local and global question type) H1, H2, H3, H4 [p45]

8. 4. Presentation and Discussion of the  Results Hypothesis 1 : As the level of proficiency decreases, the number of idea units recalled will decrease. ?confirmed Recall protocols of Passage A and B were first analyzed by the quantity of idea units recalled. The mean and standard deviation(SD) of the units in Upper-third, Middle, and Lower-third ability group were compared with each other.

9. Table 2 : the participants of Upper-third  group recalled the most and Lower-third  group people recalled the least in both  Passage A and B. (ANOVA) Table 3 : Scheffe� test. There were significant differences between scores for the groups Upper-third and Middle, and for the groups Upper-third and Lower-third, but that there was no significant difference between scores for the groups Middle and Lower-third. Low amount of idea units produced by Lower-third group indicates that they failed to use bottom-up and top-down processing harmoniously.