Does activating cultural schemata facilitate EFL learners’ listening comprehension?
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Abstract
This study tried to find the possible relationship between listeners’ cultural schemata and its activation and their
performance in EFL listening comprehension. The participants of this study were two groups of 37 Muslim Iranian students. Firstly, the students were divided into two groups of high and low proficiency. Then, they were exposed to two audio files, one about mosques and the other about cathedrals. In one of the classes, the recording about the cathedrals was played first but in the other, the order was reversed. The collected data were inputted into the SPSS program. The null hypothesis of the study was whether listening to a culturally unfamiliar topic (cathedrals) can activate low-level learners’ schema of the culturally familiar topic (mosques). The hypothesis of the study was accepted implying that an unfamiliar text, even if it is conceptually similar, cannot activate a culturally familiar schema in the low-level students. This study has pedagogical implications for teaching listening comprehension.
Keywords: Cultural schemata, language proficiency, schema activation, listening comprehension
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