Intervening in Tertiary Students' Strategic Listening in Japanese as a Foreign Language

This is an exploratory study from a cognitive psychology perspective. It investigates the listening strategies used by tertiary-level learners of Japanese as a foreign language in non-interactional listening tasks. The study addresses four research questions: (1) What are the listening strategies used by native speakers of Japanese (Ll) and by above-average proficiency (AAP) and below-average proficiency (BAP) tertiary-level learners of Japanese as a foreign language who are Australian-English speakers, in audiovisual (A V) and audio-only (A) listening contexts? ; (2) How does the voice medium in different genres (television news broadcasts and television family dramas) influence these speakers' listening strategies in AV and A listening contexts? ; (3) What are the similarities and differences in strategy use in A V and A listening contexts between the Ll group and the AAP and BAP L2 subgroups? ; what are the effective strategies used by these speakers? ; and what types of strategies should be included in an instructional package for an effective intervention program? (4) Does the listening strategy intervention program developed in this study result in more strategic listening in Japanese? The study was conducted in two stages. Study 1 pursued refinement of a listening strategy classification scheme for use in Study 2. Study 2 sought to develop, administer, and evaluate the efficacy of a listening strategy intervention program. The participants' verbal data were collected and analysed using the think-aloud protocol method, which is most effective for capturing listeners' on-line processing of authentic Japanese satellite texts. In Study 1, twelve students were classified as the AAP and BAP groups according to their test results on The Japan Foundation Japanese Language Proficiency Test. The AAP and BAP data were compared to the data of the two native speakers of Japanese. Data analysis from Study 1 identified similar and dissimilar use of listening strategies by the L1 and L2 groups. All three groups used cognitive strategies more often under the A V conditions and metacognitive strategies more often under the A conditions. Under the A V conditions, they used cognitive strategies related to top-down processing and under the A conditions they used those related to bottom-up processing. The data also revealed a distinctive pattern in strategy use that differentiates the L1 from the two L2 subgroups. The Ll used more cognitive strategies to comprehend the news texts and more metacognitive strategies to comprehend the drama texts. The reverse applied for both the two L2 groups. More importantly, the L1 and to a lesser extent the AAP, used cognitive strategies related to top-down processing. The BAP focused on other strategies related to bottom-up processing. The genre of text had little effect on the choice of listening strategies by the learners of Japanese in this study. Qualitative analysis of the protocol data, however, revealed striking differences between the two L2 groups despite the similarities in the range and frequency of the strategies they used. The AAP identified the meaning of key terms then evoked instantly other top-down processing strategies: 'elaborating', 'inferencing', or 'visualising'. The BAP identified key terms in isolation without attempting linkage to other parts of the same texts or aspects of the full text. Unlike the AAP, the BAP could not access this information quickly to enable them to trigger other strategies so their interpretation was mostly confined to single words. With extensive attention to individual words, the BAP' s processing became overloaded and they generally could not remember what they had comprehended. In contrast the AAP could relate what they comprehended and process larger chunks of