The Impact of Explicit Instruction on Listening Comprehension Strategies in a Second Language Classroom

Name of Author : Dr. Prabhakar Vadlamudi

Abstract: It was discovered that though listening skills was part of the curriculum, it was never taught systematically. The responses provided by the subjects to the questions in the questionnaire, the informal/formal interviews in relation to LC previous experience at the school level confirmed that they had not been initiated into the learning of listening skills. They brought false beliefs with them about ESL learning in general and specifically LC from their previous formal learning experience. These beliefs needed to be corrected. These findings were supported by the findings from the response of the learners to the initial diagnostic test and the listening activities in the classroom. They had problems in processing and comprehending the texts. Some of the problems they faced were, they could not discriminate between sounds, guess meanings of unfamiliar words from the context, understand different accents, and make use of their background knowledge. On the other hand, they were able to comprehend the text if the input was slow paced and repeated many times. Also they had less difficulty when the text did not have many interlocutors and if the accent was not native. However, they did not show much evidence of employing effective LC strategies. To summarise, the learners had little or no knowledge about the process of learning a language in general, learning listening comprehension skills in particular. They further did not possess any knowledge about using different LC strategies to enhance their LC ability. Armed with this information, the researcher started training them in the use of effective listening strategies with the help of different tasks and examining periodically the effectiveness of the strategy instruction in transforming the incompetent undergraduate listeners into competent listeners. It was evident from the present research that metacognitive awareness, varieties of LC strategy instruction, embedded with numerous tasks, produced efficient results; meanwhile it was further apparent that the pre, while and post listening activities played a key role to advance the LC ability of the undergraduates. In order to perform the investigation, the present research incorporated qualitative method with multi-investigation instruments coupled with appropriate LC strategies and proper LC classroom activities.

Keywords : Listening, Comprehension, Strategies, Second Language Classroom

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