Compreensao oral em lingua estrangeira : aspectos psicolinguisticos, fatores fonetico-fonologicos e questoes de ensino-aprendizagem

Abstract

The objective of this dissertation is to understand factors involved in listening comprehension tasks in a foreign language, as well as strategies used by students in such tasks, which consist of listening to dialogs between native speakers of English that are recorded in tapes in order to develop and test such ability in exams at the end of each level finished by the students. It was asked which factors were involved in the listening comprehension tasks according to the students´ point of view and which strategies were used. The data analysed came from the following sources: (1) the answers given by the students in a questionnaire applied after an exam which tested their listening comprehension and (2) from written passages completed by the students about their comprehension after listening tasks in the classroom. The analysis was based in theories about the teaching/learning of listening comprehension in a foreign language, in studies developed by Speech Sciences as well as by Psycholinguistics. The questionnarie revealed that the students attributed their difficulties mainly to phonetic factors such as speech rate and reductions in speech. The analysis of the passages completed by the students brought up strategies used by them which showed that they processed the information they listened to using both linguistic information and their previous knowledge of the given topics