QUANTITATIVE STUDY ANALYSIS

Quantitative Study Analysis

Quantitative Study Analysis

Introduction

“The primary aim of the study that has been conducted is to ascertain the effect of topic knowledge on the allocation of Working Memory (WM) resources in experienced nonnative listening comprehension compared with native comprehension.”

The study argues that experienced nonnative use a lot of WM to comprehend listening when they have knowledge on a topic of a given subject than compared to the native counterparts. Furthermore, the study also takes on a major stand that WM index scores of the native listeners didn't change significantly in Topic as well as in No Topic situations. The whole study is about an experimental study which was designed to test the above hypotheses after which conclusions have been drawn on the basis of the findings (Schumann, 1998).

Methodology

Quantitative research was carried out through an experimental design in which a hypothesis was followed by the quantification of data and numerical analysis was also conducted. The ANOVA experimental approach was used in which there were thirty native Australian English listeners who participated while thirty were listeners who were not natives. On the basis of the experiments, the study can be considered as experimental because the participants have been allocated randomly (Mackey & Gass, 2005).

For this quantitative research, the dependent variable was the listening comprehension and the independent variables included topic knowledge, listening time frame, and listening recall among others. External input that influenced the results were prevented by the researchers and this was done by having short periods of time between testing sessions (Mackey& Gas, 2005). The study seems very informative with regards to language learning because it depicts how students are likely to recall information from passages or from the passages that they listen with regards to a topic which is given and if they show familiarity with regards to the topic. A good example was when students seemed to recall more information about their own religions (Mackey & Gass, 2005).

Furthermore, it has been stated in the study that large amounts are WM are required for tasks which they are not familiar with. Moreover, with practice and experience performance is enhanced and fewer resources are needed for L2 listening. Lastly, the study shows that if students are exposed to a task and they get accustomed, this decreases their language anxiety and enhances their performance. However, the approach of the researchers had the certain limitations that included the ...