Development of a Listening Strategy Intervention Program for Adult Learners of Japanese

Abstract

The paper reports the results of Phase 2 of a study that investigates the listening comprehension strategies used by adult learners of Japanese. Phase 1 of the study identified the learners' listening strategies and categorised these strategies into a classification scheme and Phase 2 evaluated the efficacy of the listening-strategy intervention program. The listening-strategy classification scheme from Phase 1 provided the empirical basis for the Phase 2 instructional package of task-effective strategies for the intervention program. This paper reports the results of Phase 2 study. Members of the intervention group were taught to use three strategies ndash; ‘identifying key terms’, ‘elaborating’, and ‘inferencing’ ndash; to comprehend satellite Japanese news texts. The intervention program was administered during the course of teaching the intermediate-level Japanese course offered at a metropolitan university in Australia, where the data for the Phase 1 study were collected. Assessment of the intervention program's results indicated that the intervention group who received instruction on listening strategies achieved a higher level of comprehension than the non-intervention group. The implications of the study are discussed.