The Effects of Task Difference and Repetition in Listening Comprehension

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to investigate how task difference and repetition can affect listening comprehension (LC). The tasks used in the experiment were the four-option multiple-choice task (MC) and the open-ended task (OE). The data collected from 54 Japanese university freshmen showed that listeners performed consistently better on MC than OE. This study also found that there was a difference between MC and OE in the effects of repetition: for MC, playing the text twice was effective in improving LC, but playing it three times was not so helpful: for OE, playing the text twice was not enough, playing it three times was needed to facilitate LC. In addition, this study compared MC with OE from the viewpoint of listeners' ranking among the first-, the second-, and third-hearing. The results showed a distinctive difference: high correlations were found in OE, but low correlations in MC. Based on these results, it is suggested that the outcome of listeners' performance depends on whether or not guessing could be utilized.