The relationship between the use of extensive listening tasks and listening skills of English language learners

Abstract

İngilizce Öğrenenlerin Dinleme Becerileri ile Yaygın Dinleme Ödevlerinin Kullanımı Arasındaki İlişki araştırılmıştır.

This study aims to explore the relationship between extensive listening tasks and listening skills of English language learners. The participants are 32 Turkish learners of English. All of the participants of the present study were enrolled in a program at the Faculty of Engineering. As the faculty is an English medium faculty, all the students must attain certain level of language proficiency in the target language. For that reason, students who do not pass the test of English at the very beginning of the academic year must take an intensive English course at the School of Foreign Languages. The study was conducted in the spring term of 2013-2014 academic year. Three groups of students were selected for the study; one as an experimental group and two for control groups. However, one group from the control group was excluded from the research as they had higher points in the listening test compared to the other two groups. The research was carried out with one experimental and one control group for six weeks. The control group received regular instructioin in the English course and the experimental group, besides the regular instruction, was required to read and listen to six graded books with audio components. The listening skills of both groups were tested at the beginning and at the end of the treatment period of the study. Pre-test, post – test, and proficiency tests were administrated on a regular basis. Additionally a questionnaire and teacher field notes were used for additional data collection. The results of the statistical analyses showed that although there was no significant increase in the development of students' listening skills, the experimental group showed a significant difference in the post-test and the proficiency tests. It is also noted that most of the students in the experimental group reported a significant contribution of extensive listening texts to their vocabulary growth and language development in general.