Effects of Noise Factors on Japanese EFL Learners' Listening
Rikutaka Kanayama, Yuichi Ono · 2024
This study aims to investigate how listening materials with background noise affect foreign language learners' listening comprehension of the target language. To identify suitable noise conditions and noise levels, an experiment was conducted using a dictation task. Thirty-five Japanese university students participated in the experiment, during which they completed a dictation task on audio with three different types of background noise, followed by a rating of the audio's perceived clarity. After analyzing the data, the results yielded several key insights. First, specific noise conditions that significantly affected the perception of the listening materials were identified. Second, it was observed that acoustic features of individual phonemes, altered by the noise, tended to affect both accuracy and perceived clarity. These findings are expected to contribute to the development of listening materials with appropriate background noise to enhance learners' listening skills.