On listening comprehension: Linguistic strategies used by second language learners in non-collaborative discourse

Two objectives guide this dissertation: (1) determining which task reveals more comprehension by L2 listeners when they listen to a passage in non-collaborative discourse; (2) identifying the introspective strategies used to comprehend the aural passage.Both comprehension and strategies are analyzed in a study based on a psycho-cognitive framework in which comprehension of spoken language is assumed to be a process of decoding and encoding language. Comprehended language is held either in the long-term memory (LTM), or short-term memory (STM). Furthermore, it is assumed that listeners make use of strategies to understand language.Data were collected during a post-listening task, an on-line task and a retrospective interview. The two first tasks were designed to measure comprehension, and the last was an introspective task designed to probe the subjects' points of view on the listening comprehension process. Fifty-nine students of Portuguese at the University of Illinois participated in the post-listening task. Based on their recall protocols, twelve subjects were selected as High, Middle and Low-group subjects, of which there are four in each group. The scoring procedures of the recall protocols are based on Meyer (1979). The verbal reports collected during the retrospective interview were analyzed according to Oxford (1990).The results show that all subjects recalled more idea units during the on-line task than in the post-listening task when language is assumed to be in STM. However, the conclusion is that comprehension was best revealed during the post-listening task. This is so because comprehension is considered to be the manner in which one hears, then organizes the language into verbal units and applies meaning to language, not only the number of recalls, as shown in the on-line task. The subjects' introspections on the comprehension process revealed that the High-group subjects were more aware of their strategies. The results also show that the High-group subjects demonstrated more comprehension, despite having studied Portuguese for less time. Due to the fact that they were older than the others, it is suggested that maturational factors might possibly have affected the High-group subjects' performance.U of I OnlyETDs are only available to UIUC Users without author permissio