Aural Decoding and Comprehension in L2 Listening

ABSTRACT Studies have established a strong relationship between vocabulary and second language (L2) listening comprehension. While some studies adopted main‐idea scoring for listening comprehension, this study investigated this topic by controlling learners’ proficiency levels and adopting main‐point scoring for analysis. Fifty‐eight Japanese intermediate‐level university students listened to and transcribed two passages and demonstrated their comprehension via free written recall. Their aural decoding and listening comprehension exhibited a correlation of 0.72 overall, and were higher for higher‐proficiency learners than others. Errors that were phonologically similar to the input accounted for most errors. While more errors were observed in function words than in content words, the ratio of errors that were phonologically similar to the input was higher in content words.