TOEIC 듣기 능력과 학습자의 배경, 동기 그리고 전략사용의 관련성에 대한 연구

Abstract

Improving communicative competence has been the goal of foreign language learning for decades. In order to develop the learners' communicative competence, listening comprehension has been identified as the most difficult language skill, because listening is the only language skill over which an individual cannot control the rate or speed of input. Due to these facts, listening has not been easy for foreign language learners. Therefore, it is necessary to have a comprehensive understanding of learners' motivation and strategy use. Recognizing the importance of the student's role in foreign language learning, much effort has been expended in the past on the empirical examination of the effects of English learning motivation and strategy use on English achievement. However, previous studies have not provided a systematic and comprehensive understanding of the causal relationships among those variables within a single framework. Moreover, there has been a lack of attention to the individual language skills in most studies of English learners' motivation and strategy use even though they are known to be skill and task-specific. This study focuses on the relationship between learner factors and improvement in TOEIC listening comprehension. It is hypothesized that TOEIC listening improvement may be related to the learners' background and attitude toward listening, their motivation and the use of listening strategies. A survey which includes learners' background, motivation and listening strategies, pre-TOEIC listening test and post-TOEIC listening test results was used for this study. This experiment was conducted for 12 weeks with 192 university students who are all freshmen. However, this TOEIC course is not an obligatory subject, so many of the students didn't participate fully in the research. The main results obtained from this study are as follows : First the group was quite homogeneous; all the students had no experience living in English speaking countries and no previous experience in studying TOEIC. Additionally, most of them have instrumental motivation rather than wholly linguistic reasons, which means that they study TOEIC to prepare for their future employment. Also, most of them prefer to use compensation strategies rather than cognitive strategies. Second, based on the analysis of co relations, the researcher found that the quantity of listening is a significant factor in their improvement. The searcher couldn't find any meaningful co relation between the improvement of listening score and learners' motivation. or the use of differing strategies. According to the survey, learners are all university freshmen without any experience in both TOEIC and English countries. Furthermore, there were a few obstacles during the research such asthe fact that the number of participants fell at the end of the research as well as the short research period. In conclusion, it is highly recommended that this research can go on to further study with a longer research period and a more varied group in order to find more factors of listening improvement.