Listening has proved to be a difficult skill to teach in the language classroom. Research has shown that pre-listening activities, or those activities done with students prior to listening, can have an effect on listening comprehension outcomes. This research addressed the effectiveness of two types of pre-listening activities: top-down and bottom-up. Volunteers from intermediate level courses taught at Brigham Young University were divided into two treatment groups and a control group. The treatment groups followed a mixed models design by each going through a top-down and bottom-up pre-listening activity, followed by listening to a passage in Mandarin Chinese and taking a multiple-choice test. The bottom-up activity chosen for this research was a vocabulary preview activity, with an advance organizer being chosen for the top-down activity. Results showed both treatment groups significantly outperformed the control group for both the top-down and bottom-up activities (p=0.0123 and p=0.0181 respectively). No significant difference existed in scores between top-down and bottom-up activities (p=0.9456). It was determined that both the vocabulary activity and the advance organizer helped to increase the listening comprehension of intermediate level students of Mandarin Chinese.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:BGMYU2/oai:scholarsarchive.byu.edu:etd-3665 |
| Date | 07 July 2011 |
| Creators | Allen, Brandon |
| Publisher | BYU ScholarsArchive |
| Source Sets | Brigham Young University |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | Theses and Dissertations |
| Rights | http://lib.byu.edu/about/copyright/ |
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