The Influence Of Background Knowledge On The Listening Comprehension

Résumé: This study investigates the effect of EFL/ESL culture-based topic familiarity on the learners' istening comprehension ability when they listen to it. A quasi-experimental design study was conducted at the the english department of Larbi Ben M’Hidi university in order to see if familiarity with culture-based topic helps learners comprehend better after exposing them to such material. One english language instructor taught the experimental and control group and 47 first year students participated in the study. A test was administered as pre-and-posttests to probe the learners' performance on listening comprehension before and after the treatment applied to the experimental group. The pretest revealed no statistical difference between the two groups' performance. The treatment started and continued for 1 week. The experimental group learners were exposed to some aspects of the target culture topics selected from the Northstar : Listening and Speaking Advanced 2nd edition textbook. The control group learners were taught in the classical way. Both groups took the the post-test. The findings show thatthe experimental group learners' general and culture-based listening comprehension improved significantly. The control group learners' general listening comprehension improved.however, this improvement is statistically lower than the experimental group's improvement. The control group learners' culture-based listening comprehension did not statistically improve. The experimental group learners' significant improvement might be attributed to exposing them to culture-related topics which were unfamiliar in advance. It is concluded that familiarity with the target language culture has a pivotal role in facilitating comprehension of aural input.

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