Componential Models Of L2 Listening Analysis

In componential models of L2 listening ability, consistencies in listening performance are attributable to the characteristics of the test-taker’s underlying competence which leads to the leaners’ ability in a variety of settings and tasks (Buck, 2001). Therefore, the components and processes of listening must be clear in defining the construct of L2 listening ability. Unsurprisingly, defining the construct of L2 listening ability has been challenging. As Buck (2001) states that there is still incomplete understanding about the important sub-skills or components of listening ability. Vandergrift (2004); Graham (2006); Prince (2012) state that listening comprehension is a massively parallel interactive process in which students interpret rapidly

These models include both linguistic and non-linguistic components of L2 listening ability, and attempt to synthesize different sub-skills and sub-components of L2 listening into a single construct. To apply the knowledge, Rost (2013), Goh (2000), Wilson (2003), Vandergrift (2007), Prince (2012) divides into bottom-up and top-down processes in listening comprehension. Moreover, Rost (2013) describes that model of L2 listening ability should consist the components: phonological knowledge, syntactic knowledge, semantic knowledge, pragmatic knowledge and general knowledge. The terms of knowledge refer to components of listening ability. According to Rost, the use of syntactic, semantic and pragmatic knowledge quickly covers the bottom-level (skill-specific) ability of L2 listening comprehension. Among non-linguistic components, Rost only includes general knowledge, defined as world knowledge and knowledge of how to apply one’s knowledge in testing

These processes have usually been categorized as bottom-up and top-down processes, with a combination of the two leading to successful comprehension. Bottom-up and top-down processes are applied to conceptualize L2 listening (Goh, 2000; Wilson, 2003; Vandergrift, 2007, Prince, 2012). The application of linguistic knowledge in comprehension is usually termed bottom-up processing, whereby the sounds, words, clauses and sentences of a passage are decoded in a fairly linear fashion to elicit meaning (Rost, 2002). Listeners applies bottom-up processes when they construct meaning by accretion, gradually combining increasingly larger units of meaning from the phoneme-level up to discourse-level features. Meanwhile, Tsui and Fullilove (1998) describes in ‘top-down processing’, the listeners’ knowledge of the topic, and their general knowledge of the world and of how texts generally work, will interact with this linguistic knowledge to create an interpretation of the text. In addition, Vandergrift (2007) describes that listeners activate top-down processes when they use prior knowledge (topic, genre, culture and other schema knowledge stored in long-term memory) to build a conceptual framework for