Investigating the Relationships Between Listening Skills and Genre Competence Through Cognitive Diagnosis Approach

Abstract

Although research on listening skills has been frequently conducted to discover the nature of listening comprehension, there is little study about listening genre competence which is related with knowledge about listening text types. In order to find out whether listening skills and listening genre competence are related, cognitive diagnosis, a quantitative method to disclose finer-grained latent attributes, was adopted in this study. The generalized deterministic inputs, noisy “and” gate (G-DINA) model, which takes attribute compensation and attribute interaction into consideration, was used to carry out cognitive diagnostic analysis. The listening comprehension subtest of Band 4 of Test for English Majors (TEM) which is a large scale English proficiency test for English Majors in China was used as the proficiency test for homogenizing the participants. Three genres in the subtest, dialog, lecture, and news, were investigated. The 2,285 subjects were sophomore English major college students and also test-takers of the same TEM4 examination. They were chosen by random sampling from the nationwide test population in China. The study analyzed three types of relationships between listening skills and genre competence. By analyzing how mastery of certain listening text genres goes with mastery of listening skills according to latent class distribution, the coexistence relationship was discovered. By comparing the average number of skills/genres mastered when the number of genres/skills mastered increases through One-Way ANOVA, compensatory and contributory relationships were revealed. The study also found that the subjects mastering Lecture genre got higher listening scores.