The Use of a “Think-Pair-Share” Brainstorming Advance Organizer to Prepare Learners to Listen in the L2 Classroom

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of prelistening activities, particularly interactive brainstorming advance organizers that used a “Think-Pair-Share” structure, on the listening comprehension performance of L2 junior high school students. The term advance organizer is defined as a teaching activity that helps build or activate L2 learners’ prior knowledge for a listening task, or as the provision of support to promote learning. The results show that the participants who had the advance organizer of picture brainstorming scored substantially higher than those in the vocabulary brainstorming group or the control group. The differences between the vocabulary brainstorming group and the control group, however, failed to reach a significant level. The findings suggest that the use of certain advance-organizer activity in the prelistening stage helps L2 learners comprehend a text better, and that L2 learners agree with the effectiveness associated with the use of brainstorming advance organizers as an instructional strategy in helping them activate their prior knowledge, boost their confidence for the test, reduce their performance anxiety, make connections with their own life experiences, and inspire new thoughts.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We would like to express our gratitude to the English instructor, Shi-Rang Zhang for allowing us to conduct this study in three of his classes and to the study participants at the Makung Junior High School in Penghu for their participation in the brainstorming sessions. We would also like to thank seven students, Hang-Yu Zhou, Min-Jin Li, Nan-Xin Wang, Ding-Hao Sun, Yun-He Huang, Miao-Yi Zheng, and You-Ci Zhang, in the Department of Applied Foreign Languages at National Penghu University of Science and Technology for helping create the advance organizers in the study. Gratitude is extended to the anonymous reviewers and the editor for their detailed feedback and constructive comments, which helped improve the quality of this research paper. This work was supported by the Ministry of Science and Technology in Taiwan under Grant 104-2815-C-346-009-H.