Abstract
Academic listening skill is an indispensable necessity for English for academic purposes (EAP) students in English-medium universities and also critical for their future success in comprehending conference lectures. But due to the specific nature of such academic lectures, nonnative students all too often face challenges in getting a full command of this task. This study investigates the challenges of listening to academic lectures and the impact of related metacognitive strategies on academic lecture listening comprehension on a group of Iranian learners in an EAP workshop. Fifteen academic staff who took part in two intact classes at the University of Qom, Iran, were randomly assigned to treatment ( N = 8) and control ( N = 7) groups. The treatment group received 16 hr of metacognitive strategy instruction based on the models proposed by Vandergrift during academic listening instruction, while the control group was just exposed to academic lectures with no explicit strategy instruction. The academic listening sections of the British International English Language Testing System (IELTS) were utilized to measure the listening comprehension of both groups before and after the treatment. The results of the data analysis determined that the experimental group significantly outperformed the control group in the listening posttest. The interviews before and after the treatment revealed details of challenges in academic lecture comprehension and also shed light on the perception of the learners regarding metacognitive strategy instruction and the frequency of main metacognitive strategies used in comprehending academic lectures.
Highlights
Listening in general is a challenging language skill for many learners in which they usually face frustration (Arnold, 2000; Goh, 2000). Graham (2006) in his study concluded that listening is recognized by his students as an area in which they felt the least success compared with other skills
The second research question that was investigated in this study was whether metacognitive strategy instruction improved academic lecture listening comprehension among English for academic purposes (EAP) learners
As mean scores for initial academic lecture listening comprehension illustrated in Table 1 reveal, both control and treatment groups were rather homogeneous before teaching metacognitive strategies regarding their comprehension of academic lectures, and there were no statistically significant differences between the groups (t = −.932, p ≥ .05)
Summary
Listening in general is a challenging language skill for many learners in which they usually face frustration (Arnold, 2000; Goh, 2000). Graham (2006) in his study concluded that listening is recognized by his students as an area in which they felt the least success compared with other skills. Graham (2006) in his study concluded that listening is recognized by his students as an area in which they felt the least success compared with other skills. According to the results of his interviews, students commented on challenges in recognizing words in the speakers’ accent due to inadequate exposure to authentic listening input. All these challenges bring about demotivation regarding listening. It is evident that academic listening skills do not develop by themselves They need to be fostered through explicit and extensive training (O’Malley & Chamot, 1990; Swan, 2011). Metacognitive strategy instruction has gained importance as a popular research topic among scholars (Goh, 2008; Mendelsohn, 1995, 1998; Vandergrift, 2004)
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