Determining factors of the academic performance on "listening" of spanish students of EFL. Results from the ESLC.

Abstract

The European Survey on Language Competences (ESLC), the first survey of its kind carried out in the world, was designed to collect information about the foreign language proficiency of students in the last year of lower secondary education (ISCED2) or the second year of upper secondary education (ISCED3) in European participating countries. Spain�s participation in the ESLC has provided comprehensive data about the teaching and learning of foreign languages in our country and a means to compare data with other Adjudicated Entities. The information collected will be highly valuable to improve our students� language proficiency. By means of the analysis of the ESLC database, we have tried to corroborate the hypothesis that target language exposure and use in non-formal contexts leads to better results in �listening�. Data from the ESLC show that the students from countries with the best results in listening are often exposed to English outside school, within the context of language-friendly living environments, while those with poorer results -as it is the case of Spanish studentshave very little contact with this language and few opportunities for a meaningful and interactive social use. By investigating language learning results in �listening�, we are now in better conditions to suggest that the notion of �input� can be replaced by the more ecological notion of �affordance�, which refers to the relationship between properties of the environment and the active learner