Learner feature variation in measuring the listenability for learners of English as a foreign language

Abstract

Previous research on the ease of listening comprehension (henceforth, listenability) has measured listenability on the basis of sentence properties such as the length of words/sentences and speech rate. Recent research has included features of listeners, which are required for the measurement of listenability for English learners because their listening proficiencies vary greatly from the beginner to the advanced level. Given the importance of listening proficiency as a listener feature, this study developed listenability measurement methods based on the costs of compiling listener features: expensive features extracted from test scores and inexpensive features extracted from learners’ experiences. The experimental results showed that inexpensive features made substantial contributions to the measurement of middle-range listenability.