<Research Paper>Factors Contributing to Holistic Listening of Kyoto University Students A Preliminary Study

Abstract

Different aspects of holistic listening comprehension, as found in TOEFL iBT, of Japanese-speaking Kyoto University students were studied with a battery of 15 tests. There were strong correlations among the scores of listening comprehension, reading comprehension, and listening cloze tests. On the other hand, more microscopic and local aural skills of phoneme distinction and word recognition were much more weakly correlated. Grammar and syntax knowledge was also shown to contribute little to holistic listening comprehension for the students. These findings were corroborated by the results of an exploratory principal component analysis. Multiple-regression analyses showed that about 70 percent of the variance in holistic listening comprehension was accounted for by reading comprehension of listening scripts and listening cloze. The fact that these tests are much better predictors of holistic listening ability than listening comprehension of short conversations seems to indicate the students' heavy reliance on the skills of integrating information, following the general logical flow, and grasping the main ideas of the text. Though more local skills of sound and word recognition as well as grammatical and syntactic analysis/processing did not explain much variance in the students' performance, their significance may be masked by the fairly uniform grammatical/syntactic abilities of the students as well as the uniform weaknesses in sound distinction and aural word recognition.

京大生の長文聴解力(TOEFL iBT形式)を、15のテスト群で定量的に検証した。Rasch analysisで線形化した様々な英語力の指標を変数として用い、correlation matrix, multiple linear regression, principal component analysisで指標間の相関と聴解力への貢献度の明確化を試みた。音素や単語レベルでのインプット処理がより重要な役割を果たす短文聴解(TOEFL PBT/ITP形式)に比して、長文聴解力は全体的な意味の理解が優先するので、むしろ読解力と共通部分が多く、実際、読解とListening clozeだけで、長文聴解力全体の70%近くが説明できた。更に文法・構文の認識・判断力が、京大生の場合には長文・短文の聴解力を大きく左右しない事も明らかとなった。読解力が聴解力に繋がる図式は、日本人英語学習者にとっては、ある意味で朗報であろうが、テスト作成者は、長文聴解のみでは音を捉えるという意味での聴解力の「純粋な聴解」の部分は測れないという事実に、十分に留意する必要がある。