Impact of the strategies before the hearing on listening comprehension of students at Department of English, Faculty of Education, Sana'a University

ABSTRACT

Listening strategies used to overcome communication difficulties are of crucial importance for foreign language learners. Therefore, foreign language learners might benefit from instruction on how to cope with such difficulties. University English language learners need strong oral comprehension skills for access to oral content in their academic classes. Unfortunately, instruction in effective listening strategies is often not part of their English as a foreign language (EFL) curriculum.

This study tested the hypothesis that targeted pre-listening strategies in the EFL classroom results in improved listening comprehension that can be useful in English language learners’ academic content classes. It is a true experimental project: randomly dividing the sample into two groups (experimental and control), a pre-test, the treatment, and then post test. A pre-test of listening comprehension was held before conducting the experimental treatment to find out that the students in both groups were almost at an equal level. After receiving 10 listening strategy training sessions, subjects showed a statistically significant improvement in the post test of listening comprehension and the null hypotheses were rejected at .05 probability level.

The main research hypotheses examined the importance and the benefit of using pre- listening strategies at university level and the results of the post test confirmed that the tested pre–listening strategies can promote students’ listening comprehension positively. As a result, this study recommended that the targeted pre-listening strategies as well as listening comprehension need to be part of the EFL curriculum.