The aim of this empirical case study was to examine the challenges of academic listening as perceived by international students for whom English was not the first language. The project also endeavoured to elucidate the cognitive processes involved in academic listening, in order to consider ways of alleviating the aural difficulties students face in an anglophone, university environment. The participants were nine international students, enrolled on a pre-sessional English programme, in preparation for their degree courses at a British university. The theoretical framework incorporated a Vygotskian sociocultural approach of mediation and Dynamic Assessment. Activities focused on examining the participants’ understanding of short TED Talks and improving their comprehension through mediated interventions that included experimenting with metacognitive listening strategies, recommended by applied linguistics. Evidence from the listening tasks and student testimonies revealed that a lack of vocabulary, as well as problems with accents and segmenting connected speech were the principal barriers to successful academic listening comprehension. The findings also indicated that metacognitive strategies, in particular prediction, were useful tools that helped students to approach listening tasks in more effective ways. A striking insight was the importance of positive affect in improving the participants’ perceptions of listening competence. By the end of this project, most students felt their academic listening skills had improved. Although it is epistemologically invalid to draw generalised conclusions from such a small case study, the research suggests that teaching metacognitive strategies might be a useful method of improving listening performance among pre-sessional students. More research is needed to shed further light on the efficacy of this approach.
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Brown, Karen
Rights Holders: Brown, Karen Supervisors: Spiro, Jane
School of Education
MA Education
2019
© Brown, Karen Published by Oxford Brookes UniversityAll rights reserved