What Do Students Think and Do in Extensive Listening?

Analyses of Students' Listning Journals

Abstract

This paper examines the listening journals (LJs) written in English by a group of Japanese college students as a means to uncover their behavior and thoughts while they are engaged in extensive listening (EL). The participants were 36 male and female college freshmen with high-intermediate English proficiency. The parts about the comprehension of materials were extracted from LJs for analysis. The students’ entries were analyzed by manual categorization as well as by using KH-Coder, corpus analysis software (Higuchi,2012). From the analyses, the main factors affecting the students’ listening comprehension turned out to be vocabulary knowledge, speed of speech, and background knowledge. It was also revealed that, to enhance their comprehension in EL, the students listened to the same audio repeatedly, used subtitles, and selected the content they were somewhat familiar with. The effectiveness of using corpus analysis to investigate the students’ LJs seems to have been endorsed.