Impact of Teaching Academic Text Cohesive Devices on ESL Undergraduates’ Listening Comprehension

Abstract

This paper reports on a study investigating the effects of teaching academic text cohesive devices on ESL students' listening comprehension. The main objective of the study was to find out if through teaching cohesive devices would enhance students' prior knowledge and subsequently result in increased listening comprehension. Based on a pre-test post-test research design, 40 students enrolled in English for Academic Purposes course at a university in Malaysia were engaged as participants. A listening comprehension test was conducted prior to and post-intervention. The intervention consisted of lessons on academic text cohesive devices. The data were then analysed and reported using descriptive statistics and paired samples t-test. From the findings, it was clear that there was an increase in the minimum and maximum scores as well as in the mean scores between the pre-and post-test scores. More importantly, there was evidently a significant improvement in the participants' post-test listening comprehension scores as compared to the pre-test scores. In sum, the teaching of academic text cohesive devices does have a significant impact on ESL learners' listening comprehension. Hence, two recommendations for the teaching of listening to ESL learners are: one; to recognize the place of prior knowledge in enhancing comprehension and two; to facilitate listening comprehension through appropriate pre-, while-and post-listening activities.

Measuring EFL Learners' Ability to Recover and Reconstruct Missing Information in Spoken English Discourse

“…The majority of the studies were carried out in the field of writing and reading. Tahsildar & Yusoff (2014) and Japeen's et al (2013Japeen's et al ( , 2014 studies showed that cohesive devices had a positive effect on learner's ability to comprehend English. Dukta's (1979) study reported positive and significant relationship between total substitution scores and reading scores.…”

Developing a Mahārah Al-Qirā′ah Teaching Model Based on Grammatical and Discourse Competence

“…According to (Mu, 2006), the knowledge of cohesion and coherence (discourse competence) directly influences reading comprehension. The activation of grammatical competence and discourse competence can contribute to two schemata, namely, linguistic schemata, and formal schemata (Tahsildar & Yusoff, 2014); (Uysal, 2012). The research concerned here developed a model of teaching mahārah al-qirā′ah that lecturer could use to overcome students' weaknesses in certain areas of competence needed for text comprehension and particularly weaknesses in grammatical competence and discourse competence.…”