Strategies employed by Iranian EFL freshman university students in extensive listening: a qualitative research

Abstract

This paper discusses the findings of a qualitative study on the strategies employed by Iranian freshmen in extensive listening. A group of 12 freshman university students were purposefully selected based on their scores in the Oxford Placement Test administered. Four learners were identified as advanced, four as intermediate, and four as lower intermediate. A semi-structured interview was then conducted from which six of them were identified for the think-aloud protocol to elicit the strategies they employed. The analysis of the interviewees’ interview and think-aloud data generated six major themes. One theme – concentration/attention – described metacognitive strategies; three themes – visualization, note-taking, and inferencing by guessing and using cues and background noise – described cognitive strategies; and two themes – communicating and skipping – described additional strategies. The implication of the study is that these strategies used in extensive listening by English as a foreign language learners need to be explicitly taught and the learners also need to listen to their target language more and more to improve their listening skills by using more top-down strategies.