Listening Anxiety: Its Relationship to Speech Rate and Topic Familiarity

Nobuko Osada

This paper is intended as an investigation of the factors affecting listening anxiety. Since listening comprehension is a highly anxiety-provoking skill, it is important for EFL teachers to recognize the factors that can impede successful listening.

Of all the factors that researchers believe affect listening comprehension, this paper deals especially with speech rate and topic familiarity. A growing number of studies have been made on listening comprehension; however, only a few of them take speech rate and topic familiarity into consideration as factors influencing learners’ affective states.

A total of 103 less proficient university students (94 male and 9 female) listened to four short passages from Voice Of America broadcasts (Passage A: faster/familiar, B: faster/unfamiliar, C: slower/familiar, and D: slower/unfamiliar). Then they answered which passage they thought was delivered at a faster rate, A or B (C or D), and which passage they thought was more difficult to comprehend, A or B (C or D).

Results showed that learners tended to judge the passages of unfamiliar topics to be faster than those of familiar topics, especially when they listened to faster passages (A and B). Several suggestions are made for selecting listening materials for less proficient learners.