A Longitudinal Study of Listening Perception in Adult Learners of English: Implications for Teachers

Abstract

Abstract: This study is intended to help ESL (English as a second language) instructors make evidence-based decisions based on second language (L2) listening-development findings when selecting features for pronunciation instruction. In a longitudinal study of listening perception, we examined five common problems to determine which were most likely to improve in the absence of explicit instruction and which ones did not improve over time. Twenty Mandarin and 20 Slavic language speakers completed 5 tasks at 2-month intervals over a period of 10 months; we measured their listening perception of word stress, sentence stress, intonation, can/can’t, and -teen/-ty number distinctions. We also compared the participants’ scores at the final testing time to native speaker scores on the same tests. The L2 learners’ perceptions of sentence stress, intonation, and -teen/-ty number distinctions improved while their perceptions of word stress and can/can’t did not. When the L2 speakers’ performance on the tests at the 10-month point was compared to that of the native speakers, there were no significant differences for word stress, intonation, and -teen/-ty number distinctions. However, the native speakers significantly outperformed the Slavic speakers on sentence stress and outperformed both the Slavic and Mandarin speakers on can/can’t distinctions. Implications for pronunciation teaching within general adult ESL classes are discussed.