Abstract
This study investigated the influence of semantic maps on EFL students' listening comprehension. The purpose of the study was to discover whether semantic maps could be used as a listening aid in helping university students in Taiwan to better comprehend academic spoken texts. The subjects in the one-month experiment were 111 freshman students selected from three different departments. The experiment, based on the Latin Square Design, had four listening texts as materials and also four treatment groups. To examine the most effective time to provide the semantic maps, pre-listening, while-listening, and post-listening treatments were conducted along with a control group which did not have the semantic map. Following each listening text, a ten-item multiple choice comprehension test was administered to test the students' understanding. Questionnaires asking about students' strategy use were distributed immediately after the tests, and finally a questionnaire eliciting students' attitudes toward using the semantic maps in helping their listening was distributed at the end of the experiment. The four research questions explored in this study were: (1) Can semantic maps help EFL students' listening comprehension? If yes, when is the most effective time to provide them - before listening, during listening, or after listening? (2) Are there any differences in strategy use among the four treatments? (3) Do good listeners and poor listeners apply different strategies when performing the listening tasks? (4) What are the students' attitudes toward using semantic maps in listening? The findings specific to the research questions in this study were: (1) Semantic maps did help freshman students' listening comprehension when listening to academic spoken texts. However, the most efficient time to provide the semantic maps was not determined by this study. (2) In the comparison of the strategy use among the four treatments, eight strategies (Strategy 2-1 "memorize the whole structure of the map", Strategy 2-2 "memorize every word on the map", Strategy 2-3 "select important words on the map to memorize", Strategy 2-4 "predict or recall the content of the speech", Strategy 2-5 "organize the structure of the speech", Strategy 3-3 "recall the structure of the map to help memorization", Strategy 3-4 "recall the key words of the map to help memorization", and Strategy 3-5 "randomly choose an answer") were shown to be used significantly differently. (3) In the comparison of the strategy use between good and poor listeners in this study, six strategies (Strategy 1-1 "memorize the details of the speech", Strategy 1-8 "think only in English", Strategy 2-1 "memorize the whole structure of the map", Strategy 2-4 "predict or recall the content of the speech", Strategy 3-1 "recall the content of the speech", and Strategy 3-5 "randomly choose an answer") were shown to be utilized significantly differently. (4) In the survey asking about students' attitudes toward using the semantic maps as listening aids, students generally showed positive attitudes. They mostly believed that semantic maps could help their listening comprehension and they would like their teachers to use them to train their listening. However, some students pointed out that using the semantic map might have some disadvantages.