Academic Listening in Foreign Languages: Lexical Processing of Spoken Texts in Speciality

Abstract

The aim of the present paper is to analyze the perception of recorded spoken texts in a foreign language by undergraduate students in ESP classes. The study explores the role of the background knowledge and pragmatic information in recognizing lexical units in the stream of speech. The paper describes a case study of undergraduate students’ performance in acquiring special vocabulary in ESP classes while listening to a recorded text in the field of speciality. The two main tasks of the listener in word recognition are the identification of words and activation of knowledge of the meanings of words. There are two models of comprehension processes of spoken texts: bottom-up and top-down. Top-down listening infers the meaning from contextual clues and from making links between the spoken message and various types of the knowledge of the world or the background knowledge. Listening takes place in real time, learners listen and have to comprehend what they hear immediately. There is no time to go back and review, look up for unknown words, etc. Consequently, non-native listeners with partial linguistic knowledge are in the situation that requires them to use their background knowledge in the form of schemata and scripts. The activation of the background knowledge helps to compensate for the lack of the linguistic knowledge in a foreign language that is necessary to understand the meaning of lengthy spoken texts. Language learners have to apply the previous knowledge of the world and the knowledge of the context trying to infer the meanings of words in the context. Thus in the educational settings, where a listening activity is partly de-contextualised, pre-listening activities stimulate students’ knowledge of the world in the form of schemata, and they use it to infer the meaning of unknown words or words they cannot recognise in the stream of speech in a foreign language. There are three processes that account for a word in a foreign language being remembered: noticing, retrieval and generative use (Nation, 2003). “Noticing” means creating the awareness of the word, “retrieval” involves recall of the previously studied or noticed words, “generating” means a creative use of the word in different tasks. During the study the undergraduate students of Economics, Latvia University of Agriculture, participated in vocabulary knowledge tests that checked their knowledge of lexical units acquired incidentally during listening activities, which involved pre-, while- and post-listening tasks with repeated opportunities to meet the same vocabulary in the process of the listening activity. The method called the “time series design” was applied in the case study. It can be represented graphically in the following way: T1 X PT1+PT2, where “T1” is the pre-test, “X” is the treatment (the recorded spoken text + exercises), PT1 is the 1st post-test after the treatment and PT2 is the 2nd post-test after another two weeks. The results of Post-test 1 show a noticeable increase in students’ specialised vocabulary knowledge. There is a slight decrease in the knowledge of the target lexical units in Post-test 2 in comparison with Posttest 1, but the specialised vocabulary knowledge retained was superior to the knowledge the students had before listening. Students have to compensate for insufficient phonological, lexical and syntactic knowledge of foreign language. The creation of the context and the activation of the background knowledge in the pre-listening stage helped students to notice the boundaries of the unknown words of the specialised vocabulary in the stream of speech, guess their meaning and later retrieve them. Consequently, in the educational environment, it is very important to pay attention to 1) activating the background knowledge of students, 2) giving information about the context of situation, 3) providing students with repeated opportunities to meet the same lexical units during the listening session to enhance the comprehension process of the spoken text in a foreign language. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.7220/2335-2027.1.12