Читать книгу The Concise Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics - Carol A. Chapelle - Страница 116

Professionals take into account factors that affect listening comprehension when they design and use listening assessments. One of these factors is rate of speech (Brindley & Slatyer, 2002). When listeners comprehend authentic oral communication, they process a large amount of information very rapidly, which can result in cognitive overload or push working memory beyond its capacity. This means that listeners may not be able to understand input at faster speeds which can, however, be processed at slower speeds. Research also indicates that background knowledge about the topic is important for the message to be comprehended. Test takers with background knowledge on a topic related to the input are generally advantaged (Jensen & Hansen, 1995).

Accent of the speaker is another important factor that affects listening comprehension. Research has shown that the use of different speech varieties can have profound impacts on listening comprehension in assessment contexts, even when those speech varieties are very similar. Most notably, the greater the strength of an accent, that is, the less similar it is to a particular speech variety, the more challenging it is to comprehend (Ockey & French, 2016; Ockey, Papageorgiou, & French, 2016) and it is easier for language learners to comprehend familiar than unfamiliar accents (Tauroza & Luk, 1997; Major, Fitzmaurice, Bunta, & Balasubramanian, 2002; Harding, 2012; Ockey & French, 2016).

Other important factors of oral communication known to affect listening comprehension include prosody (Lynch, 1998), phonology (Henricksen, 1984), and hesitations (Freedle & Kostin, 1999). Brindley and Slatyer (2002) also identify length, syntax, vocabulary, discourse, and redundancy of the input as important variables.

Types of interaction and relationships among speakers are also important factors to take into account when designing listening assessment inputs. Monologues, dialogues, and discussions among a group of people are all types of interaction that one would be likely to encounter in real‐world listening tasks. Individuals might also expect to listen to input with various levels of formality, depending on the relationship between the speaker and the listener.