Teaching listening comprehension through online academic lectures

Abstract

Academic mobility is becoming increasingly popular for students and provides great opportunities to communicate with other people, get useful knowledge and experience and practice using a foreign language. Education abroad includes listening to lectures as one of the most common way of presenting information. Thus, students need preparation to understand foreign lecturers and be successful in their studies. Having studied 30 online lectures from diverse MOOCs, the authors identified that their structure is similar to traditional lectures. Consequently, the research was done with the use of academic lectures from the MOOC «Thermodynamics» to teach the experimental group of students from Peter the Great St. Petersburg Polytechnic University. For conducting the research the authors used a pedagogical experiment and descriptive statistical methods to analyse data received (T-statistics, chi-square and Fisher’s test). As a result, students from the experimental group showed better findings of listening comprehension skills with the average score of 65,5% compared to 44,4% of the control group. Moreover, the experimental group showed improvement in listening comprehension skills from the average score of 43% at the initial stage to 65,5% at the end of the experiment proving the effectiveness of learning activities the authors designed and used.