The Relationship of Topic Familiarity and Listening Comprehension

Abstract

In listening, topic familiarity – knowledge on particular topics is considered important to decodeand comprehend the message correctly. This profound role makes listening undergoing influential changes from passive to active process. Due to this fact, great number of researchers and practitioners have carried out considerably number of studies related to listening, especially factor that contributes to listening which is topic familiarity. Hence, this study aimed at investigating the contribution of topic familiarity to students’ listening comprehension. Undergraduate students of ELT were the samples of this study and two tests namely topic familiarity and listening comprehension test were administered. The result revealed that there was correlation between topic familiarity and listening comprehension which signified the more familiar the students with the topic, the higher listening comprehension they would get. Besides, the contribution of topic familiarity to listening comprehension was 33.6 %. .