An Empirical Study of the Factors Contributing to Japanese Junior High School Students' Listening Ability in English

The aim of the present paper is to ascertain the relationship between the listening skill and the other language (sub) skills of Japanese EFL learners at the junior high school level. The study of listening skill in second/ foreign language learning has traditionally focused on the roles of individual linguistic units, e.g. phonemes, words, grammatical structures and in the belief that the development of those elements would eventually lead to the enhancement of the overall listening skill, teaching listening comprehension has been considered the training of these linguistic units. Recently, however, the roles of the listener's background world knowledge, expectations, the situation and context have been brought to the attention of Second/ Foreign Language (SL/FL hereafter) research and it was found that a lack of subordinate skills can be compensated by the learner's world knowledge. In other words, greater importance has been attached to the multiple perspectives in building up the listening ability. However, behind these single skill acquisition studies, little attention has been paid to a multiple relationship between different language skills; for instance, between listening and speaking. How is the development of listening skill related to other language skills such as speaking or reading? Furthermore, most SL/FL studies are targeted to adolescent or adult SL/FL learners; in contrast, very few studies of this kind have been carried out in the initial stage of SL/FL learning, that is, at the junior high school level. Therefore, using a statistical procedure, the present authors tried to identify some variables, language skills and linguistic factors, which are more likely to influence the development of listening skill at an early stage of SL/FL learning