Investigating the Use of Cognitive Inferencing Listening Strategies to Learn Vocabulary The Case of Third Year Students in the Department of English at MMUTO.

Abstract

The present research is concerned with the investigation of the English language learners’ use of cognitive inferencing listening strategies to improve vocabulary learning. Third year students, option: Linguistics and ESP at Mouloud Mammeri University have been taken as a case for this study. It aims at investigating whether the inferencing listening strategies are used by third year students to learn vocabulary. This research relies on Vandergrift’s taxonomy (1997) of listening strategies. This study, in fact, is based on mixed method research. It combines both quantitative and qualitative methods. Therefore, two different research instruments are used. A questionnaire is distributed to fifty five students and an interview is conducted with three teachers of the listening module. SPSS was used for statistical data analysis and a qualitative content analysis theory is adopted to interpret and explain the results of the interview. The results revealed that third year students view listening as an interesting component of foreign language learning. Also, it is concluded that students are somehow aware of the implementation of the cognitive inferencing listening strategies to improve the learning process as well as the acquisition and the storage of the lexical items. Furthermore, the findings indicate that students tend to employ some strategies and neglect others. The paralinguistic inferencing strategies and linguistic inferencing strategies are given more importance than the voice inferencing, extra-linguistic inferencing and inferencing between- parts strategies.