Arab Educational Information Network

This study attempts to investigate the effects of the paralinguistic features used by native speakers of English on the EFL students’ listening comprehension. The answer to the following question is investigated: To what extent do the paralinguistic features affect the EFL students’ comprehension of English spoken by its native speakers at normal speed and in communicative situations? To investigate the problem of this study, two experiments were conducted on 4th year EFL students at Kafr El-Sheikh Faculty of Education, Tanta University. The first experiment was a pilot study spanning two weeks. Accordingly, the main experiment was conducted on two groups: while the first treatment group listened and at the same time watched for the paralinguistic features that accompany spoken discourse, the second control group listened only to the same material. The main experiment lasted four weeks. Then, a Listening Comprehension Proficiency Test (LCPT) was administered to both groups. The scores on the LCPT were analyzed statistically. The results have shown that there are highly significant differences among groups, variables, and their interactions. They also showed that the following paralinguistic features prove to be very effective in understanding and comprehending conversational English according to this order: proximity, posture, lip-setting, looking, facial expression, appearance, gesture, and other miscellaneous paralinguistic features distinguished by hearing. The study concluded that the paralinguistic features are very effective in listening comprehension. Likewise, it points out that within the paralinguistic features themselves, there are some features that are more effective than others. The existence of different paralinguistic features in conversation makes EFL students comprehend rather than memorize English spoken by native speakers. They also proved to be non-destructor elements in conversation. (Published abstract)