A Comparative Study of the Effects of Three Different Pre-Listening Tasks at Intermediate and Advanced Levels

Abstract

Listening comprehension involves the simultaneous understanding the interlocutors’ accent or pronunciation, grammar and vocabulary, and meaning comprehension. Thus, English learners have difficulty in comprehending the spoken language and they need some external support like pre-listening tasks. The purpose of pre-listening task is to make the listeners activate their relevant background knowledge and get any help needed for completing the task. Despite the extensive number of studies on different pre-tasks, slight attention is paid to comparing the effects of pre-listening tasks on learners’ listening comprehension at different proficiencies. To this end, the present study investigates the comparison among the effects of three different pre-listening tasks, including lexical support, content support, and telling the main purpose of listening on the improvement of learners’ listening comprehension at intermediate and advanced levels. To meet the objectives of the study, four classes from each level were selected and randomly assigned into one control and three experimental groups. Each experimental group was given one kind of pre-listening task before the post-tests. One-way ANOVA was used to analyze the data. After scoring the tests and analyzing the mean scores, significant differences were found among the effects of the three pre-tasks. The most facilitative pre-listening tasks at intermediate and advanced levels were lexical support and content support, respectively. Informing the learners of main purpose of listening was the least effective pre-task at both levels. It can be concluded that there might be no one single kind of pre-listening task appropriate for all learners. A variety of factors such as context of instruction, learners’ ages and their proficiency levels can affect the teacher’s choice of pre-task types.