Quantifying comprehension gains after repeated listening by students of Spanish with different listening ability: an exploratory study

ABSTRACT

Repeated listening—listening to a passage several times for content and information—is considered an effective strategy to improve listening comprehension, but so far, no study has reported how much understanding increases with each repetition. This study is exploratory in nature and analyzes quantitatively how much 48 students with different degrees of listening ability understand after each repeated listening. The study shows that although the amount of total comprehension relates to learners’ listening ability (low, medium, high), comprehension gains—new information understood after the first and second repetition—do not relate to learners’ listening ability. The data indicate that understanding increased at a similar rate after the first repetition, 14% more, and after the second repetition, 9.3% more, in the three groups. These results suggest that there is benefit in repeated listening and propose its use as an independent learning tool that works at different levels of listening ability.

RESUMEN

La audición repetida, escuchar un pasaje auditivo varias veces prestando atención al mensaje, es una estrategia eficaz para mejorar la comprensión auditiva, pero, hasta ahora, ningún estudio ha dado cuenta de cuánto aumenta la comprensión con cada repetición. Este estudio es exploratorio y analiza empíricamente cuánta información nueva entienden cuarenta y ocho estudiantes con diferentes niveles de habilidad auditiva después de cada audición. El estudio muestra que aunque la cantidad de comprensión total se relaciona con el nivel de habilidad auditiva (baja, media y alta), la información nueva entendida durante la primera y segunda repetición aumenta a un ritmo similar en los tres grupos: 14% más después de la primera repetición y 9.3% más después de la segunda repetición. Estos resultados apoyan el beneficio de la audición repetida y proponen su uso como herramienta independiente y que funciona con distintos niveles de habilidad auditiva.

KEYWORDS:

• Listening comprehension
• listening skill and listening ability
• repeated listening
• narrow listening
• extensive listening
• independent learning

PALABRAS CLAVE:

• Comprensión auditiva y comprensión oral
• destreza auditiva y habilidad auditiva
• audición repetida
• audición enfocada
• audición extensiva
• aprendizaje independiente

Notes

1. For a detailed review of the characteristics of scripted and unscripted spoken language see Wagner (2014).

2. The term “narrow listening” was coined by Krashen (1996) and is based on the concept of narrow reading. The narrow listening technique requires repeated listening from beginning to the end, without stopping the listening process, and focusing on the message (Rodrigo 2003).

3. Students were not trained in note-taking, and neither were they allowed to stop the listening passage while listening to it. However, they could take notes while listening or after each listening.

4. The data could be triangulated for only 16 participants the ones who provided their names in the two measuring tools (recalls and comprehension test).

5. For instance, English and Spanish are languages that use alphabetic scripts in which there is relatively significant correspondence between grapheme and phoneme (in English, a phoneme can have more than one grapheme; in Spanish, there is a largely one to one correspondence between grapheme and phoneme). However, Chinese is a Logographic/ideographic script language, one in which each symbol represents a whole word.