66 5 The Introductory Chapter
From ‘Chapter One: Introduction’ in Yeldham, Michael (2009). Approaches to Second Lan-
guage Listening Theory: Investigating the ‘Top-down/Bottom-up Debate’, p. 9. Unpub-
lished PhD thesis, University of Melbourne.
Limits to the research are noted from the start. I do not, for example, examine the learners’
listening development in interactional listening environments. The research is narrowed
down to an emphasis on one-way, or transactional listening. The research is also focused
on listening as an audio-based skill where no visual elements are presented. The study
additionally focuses on ‘learning to listen’ rather than ‘listening to learn’ (Rost 2002; Van-
dergrift 2004). In other words, the emphasis is on learning how to improve one’s listening
ability rather than using listening as a vehicle to acquire the language. There is a need
for these limitations because the investigation of listening comprehension processes and
instruction is such a complex area.
In the study, I also limit the participants to native Mandarin Chinese-speaking EFL learn-
ers in Taiwan. I choose learners in an EFL rather than an English as a second language
(ESL) context, because this EFL environment is more likely to minimise influences on the
listeners’ development outside the classroom environment, therefore providing a clearer
insight into probable developmental effects associated with the instruction. Native Chinese-
speaking learners are chosen because of the considerable distance between the English and
Chinese languages, as English is a stressed-timed language and Chinese a tone language.
This distance between the languages is especially pronounced in terms of the phonological
differences between the two languages, which have been found to present major challenges
for Chinese learners of English (Brown and Hilferty 1986; Pennington and Ellis 2000).If you set out your limits, you are more likely to finish the thesis, your supervisor
will know what you are interested in and resist attempts to send you further afield,
and, most importantly, your examiners will be impressed that they have in hand a
focused, high-impact study.
If you are working in an area that has a range of specific, but contested, words
and phrases, you may need to set out a list of key definitions. In his thesis, Michael
defined terms that are contentious in his field that include ‘top-down and bottom-
up’, ‘skills and strategies’, and ‘inferences, elaborations and guesses’. Because
there are only a few terms, he explained these one or two pages into the introductory
chapter. If he had had more such terms, and had to use a series of discipline-specific
acronyms, I would have suggested that he put them in an appendix.
Significance of the Study
The scope is linked to the significance. A way to think of the significance of your
thesis is to equate it with potential impact: Where do you think your study will
make the most difference to current thinking? There are four primary lines of argu-
ment that may be used to establish the significance of a study. First, it may advance
knowledge in the applicable field; that is, it revises or creates new knowledge (for
example, the results will extend what is known about the applicability of a theory,
the results are widely generalizable, or, for qualitative studies, transferable to other
contexts). Second, a study may contribute to the solution of a practical problem
faced by many others in the field (for example, the control of bacteria in food prepa-
ration, or the development of sustainable policies of food consumption). Third, it