Chapter 1 The Effects of Topic Familiarity and English Proficiency on Listening Comprehension
Listening comprehension is a complex cognitive process during which listeners have touse different elements of their knowledge of language such as phonetics， vocabulary andgrammar to do surface processing. They also have to take advantage of their social andcultural background knowledge to do deep-level processing semantic analysis， such asassociation and inference. In the studies of SLA， listening has aroused great concernamong researchers and language teachers due to its important function in absorption oflanguage input. A great number of studies have confirmed the effect of listeningcomprehension on second language acquisition and research in this area abounds both athome and abroad， yet most of those research focuses on the study of listening proceduresand on the various macro and micro listening skills by which a better performance onlistening comprehension could be achieved. The present study attempts to investigate theeffects of topic familiarity and the proficiency level on the Chinese non-English majors'listening comprehension， and attempts to reveal their cognitive processing in the field.
The study took as its subjects from the Hydraulic Engineering Department andfreshmen from political science department of Wuhan University. The subjects wererequired to take two tests： one test adopted the familiar passage "Nian as the listeningcomprehension test passage and the other adopted "Japanese Tea Ceremony-Cha-Nu-Yu"as the unfamiliar passage. The testing instrument is the recall protocol with threesupplementary questions for each passage which allow gaps in comprehension to surfaceand the results are used for qualitative analysis. The data collected underwent anindependent sample test， a paired sample test and an ANOVA test. Discussions andexplanations are then carried out from schemata and relevance theory perspectives toillustrate the effect of topic familiarity and the proficiency level on the listeningcomprehension of learners.
Statistical results indicate that topic familiarity exerts a significant effect on thesubjects' listening comprehension. Familiar topics enhance the learners' listeningcomprehension; leamers at both high and intermediate levels did much better on thefamiliar topic than on the unfamiliar topic. Language proficiency levels have a greatinfluence on leamers' listening comprehension; high-proficiency subjects outperformedintermediate proficiency subjects on both familiar and unfamiliar topics. High proficiencysubjects are better than intermediate level subjects in activating the relevant schema intheir mind to enhance the comprehension of'listening materials. The interactive effects ofboth topic familiarity and the proficiency level are not significant. As regard to theprocessing model， learners at both proficiency levels tend to use "top-down" processingwhen the listening passage is familiar to them and "bottom-up" when they are dealing withan unfamiliar topic.
1.1 Information processing and components of listening comprehension
Information processing is the term used to describe "the activities of the mind inextracting， processing， storing and retrieving the meaning of verbal and nonverbalcommunication"（Rivers 1981）. Within schemata theory， the process of informationprocessing is oriented by the principle that all data must be accounted for （Adam& Collins，1979）. Stated differently， every input event or datum must be mapped against certainschema， and all aspects of that schema must be compatible with the incoming information（Huang， 1998）. There exist two basic models of information processing， which shed lighton the schemata operation in the process of listening comprehension. They are the"bottom-up" and "top-down processing （Chaudron & Richards， 1986）.
1.1.1 Bottom-up processing
As far as listening comprehension is concened， the bottom-up processing refers to theform of processing in which listeners attempt to derive meaning from novel textualinformation by analyzing individual word meanings or grammatical characteristics of thetext （O'Malley & Chamot， 1990：421）. It posits that human comprehension is driven by thelistener's need or desire to process "input data" accurately.
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