چکیده:
This study examined the effect of two different authentic topic-familiar rhetorical L2 listening tasks (expository and argumentative) differing in reasoning demand on the listening comprehension scores of a number of Iranian EFL advanced learners. Sixty homogeneous advanced learners were recruited based on their performance on an English Language Proficiency test (Fowler & Coe, 1976). Then they took a researcher-made test of the two rhetorical listening tasks. The results showed statistically insignificant effect of topic-familiar rhetorical listening tasks on the participants’ listening scores. However, learners’ performance on familiar expository tasks was statistically, though not meaningfully, better than their counterparts’ performance on the argumentative tasks. It was also shown that general, vague topic familiarity cannot exclusively help affect listening quality, but it seems different rhetorical listening tasks would expose more cognitive and linguistic complexity demands on the participants’ performance. The main implication would be that Iranian advanced language learners need more precise instruction on different rhetorical tasks in conjunction with elaborated social and cultural background knowledge of topics. In addition, participants’ general proficiency level should be cautiously construed as their proficiency in listening skill, too.
خلاصه ماشینی:
Language texts (written or spoken), the second cognitive factor in our study, as an important medium for the acquisition of new knowledge in instructional settings have received a large amount of attention (Wineburg, 1996 in Vidal-Abarca, et.
In general, it was found that understanding rhetorical tasks have significant effects on the development of language skills (Andrews, 2010; Sadeghi, Hassani & Noory, 2014).
Most studies in writing and reading showed that learners will produce language of higher accuracy and linguistic complexity but lower fluency when performing on the more complex rhetorical tasks such as argumentative or expository ones compared with narrative and descriptive (Ellis & Yuan, 2004; Yang, 2014).
On the other hand, most studies mainly have focused on the effect or relationship of topic familiarity with learners’ factors, like culture knowledge (Hayati, 2009), gender (Martínez, 2013), vocabulary (Pulido, 2007), proficiency level (Chiang & Dunkel, 1992), and contextually-related factors, like languages other than English, its impact in L1 setting, and ESL contexts (e.
In fact, the existing body of research has little, if any, dealt with L2 listening quality attained by the interaction of topic familiarity and different rhetorical tasks with regard to the amount of cognitive demands imposed on the L2 listeners’ performance in EFL context.
It is possible to suggest even if the participants in this study had supposedly had enough topic familiarity, according to Rubin (1994), this would not always result in improved language learning generally and listening comprehension, specifically, because topic familiarity highly interacts with other variables such as text types and related linguistic and cognitive structures.