Inference-Making and Linguistic Skills in Listening Comprehension: An Observation of French Students Learning Chinese

Inference is an important strategy that could be applied in listening activities. It could help one to grasp the meanings of an oral message by analysing textual and contextual information. When the listener has difficulties in activities because of his poor linguistic skills, it is strongly recommended that he apply the inference strategy efficiently. But how and to what degree does this strategy influence a listener’s performance? What is the relationship between one’s inference capacity and one’s linguistic skills in listening? In this article, we present two studies conducted with 16 French-speaking learners of Chinese. In the first study, we observed, by applying listening tests and a think-aloud protocol, how eight learners (at A2 level and B1 level of the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages) carried out listening tasks with audio-visual texts. In the second one, we observed the difficulties of another eight learners (at A2 level) who listened only to audio texts (i.e. not the same tasks as in the first study). The results show that when visual clues are available, a listener’s performance is influenced to a certain extent by his capacity to apply the inference strategy. This capacity seems to be independent of his linguistic skills. Those who obtained high scores in the listening test could not always infer successfully when faced with an audio-visual presentation, while some of those who obtained low scores in the listening test showed a very strong capacity to make inferences with visual clues. Both of our studies demonstrate that a minimal linguistic level is required for successful listening comprehension, but the second study showed in particular that a low linguistic level handicaps listeners much more when they have only audio data available to them.