English Listening and Unknown Vocabulary Density
Miwako Soda 051048
Summary
This thesis focused on English listening especially dealing with vocabulary knowledge.
Through my experiment, I tried to find out how much vocabulary knowledge is needed for pleasant
unassisted listening. For my experiment, I referred to Marcella Hu Hsuch-chao and Paul Nation
（2002）’s journal article “Unknown Vocabulary Density and Reading Comprehension.” According
to them, around 98% coverage of vocabulary is needed for learners to gain unassisted reading
comprehension of a fiction text but we don’t know about these figures for listening. Therefore, I
prepared 100% coverage texts, 98% coverage texts, 95% coverage texts, and 93% coverage texts.
(Unassisted listening is far more difficult than unassisted reading, so I assumed the indicator is
around 98 %.) If we could know the indicator, it can be very helpful both English teachers and
English learners. The experiment found out that about 98% vocabulary knowledge is necessary for
English learners.
Research Questions
1. To find out whether different densities of unknown words result in differences in listening
comprehension or not.
2. Whether there is a particular threshold vocabulary level which works as a borderline between
sufficient comprehension and insufficient comprehension or not.
The experiment
Subjects: Junior and senior English majors and a graduate school student. (at N.D.S.U.)
Instrument: Written questions, summary, listening comprehension test, and story evaluation.
Procedure: I divided the 40 subjects into four groups randomly. I gave the questionnaire to the
subjects and explained about the listening test. First, the subjects read and answered questions about
listening to know the subjects’ opinions of English especially toward listening.
Then, I started the
listening comprehension test. During the listening test, they were not allowed to turn over the pages
and they were also not allowed to look back at previous pages without any instruction. And also,
they were not allowed to take memos while they were listening. The subjects listened to about 5
minutes of four short stories. After finishing listening to each of the stories, they had to answer 6
comprehension questions (which were multiple answer question type) for each story. They had 3
minutes to answer the comprehension questions. After 3 minutes passed, they wrote summary about
the story in Japanese in 5 minutes. Once they finished the listening test, they had to evaluate stories
according to the difficulty.
Table A: Groups and listening tests and listening comprehension test’ vocabulary coverage
Who’s Best?
The Big Test
Think Daniela
The Bear’s Mouth
Group A
100% coverage
98% coverage
95% coverage
93% coverage
Group B
93% coverage
100% coverage
98% coverage
95% coverage
Group C
95% coverage
93% coverage
100% coverage
98% coverage
Group D
98% coverage
95% coverage
93% coverage
100% coverage
Result: From the written questions, many of the subjects thought unknown vocabulary is the biggest
problem when they are listening to English; however they are mainly trying to improve their
listening skills through pleasant learning approach such as watching movies and listening to music.
They feel those learning approach are basically effective for advanced level English learners, but
most of the subjects’ level is actually high-intermediate.
From the experiment, it is clear that
vocabulary knowledge definitely affects listening comprehension. We can see a strong drop between
100% coverage and 98% coverage (see Table B), so threshold vocabulary level is around 98%.
Table B: Listening comprehension tests’ score
100%
98%
95%
93%
% correct
Who’s best?
72%
52%
57%
45%
56%
The big test
78%
54%
48%
52%
58%
Think Daniela
62%
30%
38%
28%
40%
The bear’s mouth
70%
38%
40%
27%
44%
average
70%
44%
46%
38%
It is clear that there is a big drop in the average score between 100% coverage and 98% coverage.
(70%→44%) However, there is no big difference between 98%, 95%, and 93% coverage.
Conclusion
From the experiment, we discovered that listening comprehension is strongly related with
vocabulary knowledge. Listening is the primary communication skill both in first language and
second language. For L2 learners, acquiring and improving listening foreign language skill is pretty
difficult, because we naturally learn how to listen to our first language without consideration. We did
not have Japanese listening class, but we still can listen to Japanese without any difficulties. Even
though there are many aspects which caused problem English listening, above all, most of the
subjects thought unknown vocabulary is the biggest problem when they are listening to English
according to the result of answered question. Vocabulary knowledge does influence our listening
comprehension, and we need to know around 98% of vocabulary if we want to listen to it for
pleasant listening.