Listening strategies used by adult learners of Japanese to comprehend satellite television programs

This paper identifies listening comprehension strategies from the perspective of cognitive psychology, with a focus on the experience of Australian learners of Japanese as a foreign language (L2). In this study, a listening strategy is conceptualised as a mental operation undertaken by a learner to solve a listening comprehension problem in a non-interactional situation. Reading researchers in L2 identified one of the variables which affects text comprehension as formal schema or discourse organisation of text (Meyer and Freedle, 1984; Carrell and Eisterhold, 1988; Carrell, 1991). However, this variable has not been the subject of intensive and extensive research in L2 listening and consequently, there is little empirical evidence which has explored this important variable. With the increased availability of media technology, satellite programs offer rich content and have the potential to provide such information. This paper investigates how news and drama texts may affect the choice of listener strategies, and discusses how the strategies selected by listeners relate to L2 learners’ language proficiency. To collect data on strategies, an introspective ‘think-aloud’ procedure is used and the results are analysed quantitatively.