Intensive English Listening Practice for Japanese High School Students: from the Perspective of English Sounds and Rhythms
215M013 K. N.
The purposes of this paper are to identify what English listening problems that Japanese high school students at the beginner level have and to explore the effective way of teaching English listening in class. According to the survey conducted by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (2015), listening skills that Japanese high school students obtain have not achieved their goal. Therefore, English language teachers are required to foster their students' listening skills.
In the first chapter, based on previous research, the following three aspects are discussed: successful listening, L2 listening problems, and teaching listening. The discussion develops an argument that L2 listeners tend to lack linguistic knowledge and the skills to decode speech instantly under the influence of their L1.
In the second chapter, the present study focuses on English listening problems in the bottom-up processes for high schools students at the beginner level. In addition, the effective way to teach listening in class is explored in order that the students can attain phonological knowledge and the automated use of linguistic knowledge. Three hypotheses are tested through the experiments conducted in English classes in a Japanese high school.
Most of the results in the first experiment to test Hypothesis 1 supported the proposition that slow speech rates did not contribute to decoding speech without having sufficient linguistic knowledge of the target sentences. The findings of the experiment imply that repeating listening to English sentences at slow speech rates without comprehending what the students heard is not useful for improving their listening skills. An exception occurred in the long sentence of which duration is about 4-6 seconds. In that case, listening to the sentence at a slow speech rate tended to promote the students' perceptions of it. It can be said that the students needed more time to process the sentence in comparison to the other sentences due to lack of their skills to decode speech quickly. This finding also supports Kohno's (2001) proposition that humans perceive one perceptual sense unit in about 1.5-2 seconds.
In the second experiment to test Hypothesis 2, the results showed that the students' performance did not give higher scores in listening to English sentences spoken by a Japanese speaker on the basis of the mora than in listening to those spoken by a native speaker of English with its rhythm, so that the results did not support Hypothesis 2. The findings imply that one factor of the mora alone did not improve the students' perceptions of the target sentences. Other factors, namely linguistic knowledge and the skills to use knowledge automatically were considered to affect the students' performance. Furthermore, it was assumed that as the students consumed most of their limited working memory capacity in processing several aspects of speech such as words and word order, enough space in their cognitive resources was not left for dealing with phonological features. At a result, the students' attention was only paid to the salient features in the two kinds of sentences respectively: stressed words in the sentences with English rhythm and the first and second words or easy ones in the sentences on the basis of the mora. Nevertheless, the findings also showed that the students had difficulty in coping with weak syllables, unstressed words and sound changes in listening to the sentences with English rhythm.
In the third experiment to test Hypothesis 3, the findings showed that learning the features of English sounds and rhythms based on the proposed listening practice developed the students' perceptions of weak syllables and unstressed words in the target sentences. In addition, in the intensive listening practice, the students listened to sentences from passages that they had already learned in a textbook, which is helpful in practical teaching because the listening tasks save time to prepare new material for teachers and introduce new words to students in a limited amount of class time. Furthermore, the use of sentences that students comprehended reduce their loads of information in their working memory, which enables the students to concentrate on acquiring phonological knowledge such as English sounds and rhythms. From these aspects, the listening practice is feasible to do in class and has several advantages.
However, there remains the question of the effectiveness for the intensive listening practice for the long term. Furthermore, as the students showed difficulty in perceiving sounds changes like linking, it is not obvious either how they come to perceive the phonological features through the listening practice. It is required to investigate further to pursue these questions.
To integrate various arguments about all the findings of this present study, the following suggestions are given as to teaching English listening to Japanese high school students at the beginner level. In the listening practice of bottom-up processes, it is important for teachers to pay attention to how many tasks are assigned to their students at one time because the students' working memory capacity will be easily consumed due to lack of automated knowledge. For example, when students do not understand what they heard the first time, it is essential for them to clarify the meaning of what they heard to obtain semantic and syntactic knowledge first of all and then they can concentrate on listening to English sounds and rhythms to attain phonological knowledge. Furthermore, the listening practice should be done in units of English phrases from early learning, which is aimed at acquiring the skills to process speech in word order. When students succeed in perceiving speech at slow speech rates, the next step taken in the practice is to encourage them to listen to a little faster speech to obtain the skills to decode speech instantly. Thus, tackling one task at a time allows students to make steady progress in improving their listening skills until they come to have automated knowledge for listening. Without the basic listening practice for accumulating the data on English sounds and rhythms, students will not be able to make best use of other listening practice. Therefore, the listening practice in bottom-up processes should be done more often in class, so that students can improve the practice in their own ways.