The Effect of Text Familiarity on Listening Comprehension A Case of ESP Electronics Students

Research in first language (L1) and second language (L2) comprehension has demonstrated that both learner and input variables (text familiarity) contribute to the ease with which a message is understood. Listening is an activeprocess in which listeners choose what to listen and interpret the message they receive. So in such a process bothlinguistic and non-linguistic knowledge is involved. By linguistic knowledge, the listener employs the knowledge he/she has about lexis, phonology, syntax as well as pragmatics and sociolinguistics in the language he is listeningto. By non-linguistic knowledge, he/she employs the general knowledge of the world or the knowledge about the topic being discussed or the context where the exchange is occurred. This article describes a study that is tryingto answer two questions. First to see if text familiarity has any effect on listening comprehension and secondly, toinvestigate the influence of text familiarity on some aspects of the language. To do so, 60 students majoring in Electronics were selected through network and convenience sampling. Two tests were administered as pre-test and post-test. The researcher then compared the scores gained by participants in the aforementioned tests, after comparison, the findings indicated that the learners got substantially higher scores after the treatment. The findings showed that text familiarity has a significant influence on listening comprehension of the learners

Keywords:

text familiarity , listening comprehension , ESP