Abstract
Listening is considered by Taiwanese students to be the most difficult skill to improve. What is it that makes listening difficult? One reason is that listeners cannot rely on word boundaries to segment a stream of speech as they always do in reading. Another is that reduced forms, that is, phonological simplifications or variations commonly found in spoken English, make the pronunciations of L2 learners’ known words deviant from their expectations. Therefore, this present study aimed to explore the effects of reduced forms instruction on college students’ overall listening comprehension and their reduced forms knowledge. Students’ attitudes toward listening difficulties, types of reduced forms, and reduced forms instruction were surveyed as well. Two freshman classes at National Tsing Hua University enrolled in the course Freshman English participated in the current study. They were randomly assigned to the experimental and the control group. Every two weeks throughout the fall semester of 2004, the experimental group engaged in a 30-minute lesson by using a previously prepared video clip where manifestations of reduced forms were present for a total of seven sessions. On the other hand, the control group, following the same treatment procedure, engaged in listening comprehension exercises by using the same materials. The instruments included a listening comprehension pretest and posttest, a reduced forms dictation pretest and posttest, a background questionnaire, treatment questionnaires, and evaluation questionnaires.The major findings of this present study are as follows. First, the reduced forms instruction did significantly raise the experimental group students’ awareness of reduced forms. Hence, reduced forms instruction might enhance students’ reduced forms knowledge. Second, the facilitative effects of reduced forms instruction on students’ overall listening comprehension were not salient because the experimental group did not outperform the control in the listening comprehension posttest. Third, reduced forms were considered by the students to be one of their most common listening problems and linking was the most difficult reduced form type compared to elision, contraction, and assimilation. Fourth, even though the effectiveness of reduced forms instruction in enhancing overall listening comprehension was not confirmed, the experimental group students did approve of the helpfulness of reduced forms instruction in many aspects of their listening. They also expected to see reduced forms instruction incorporated into teaching materials and regular English courses.For future research, delayed posttests on students’ reduced forms awareness and their listening comprehension are suggested in order to explore the retention of reduced forms knowledge and the longitudinal effects of reduced forms instruction on overall listening ability. In addition, researchers are encouraged to uncover the relationships between reduced forms awareness and other listening component skills such as speech perception, word recognition, or speech segmentation. Finally, the researcher hopes in the near future some studies will emerge to investigate and compare the effects of various strategies of reduced forms learning.