No abstract

This study looks at the effect of developing L2 listening fluency through extensive listening to audio graded readers. A large bank of listening fluency development questions (2,064 items) was constructed based on ten Level 1 graded readers. Three groups of L2 students were engaged in one of three different input modes while studying ten graded readers over a 13-week period: reading only, reading while listening, and listening only. All participants were given one pre-test (60 items) before the intervention and one post-test consisting of three texts (180 items) after the intervention. All the passages were delivered at the same speech rate, and the participants were allowed to listen only once. The post-test results demonstrate that the reading plus listening group produced the most consistent and significant outcome compared with the reading-only and listening-only groups. The results have some implications for developing L2 listening fluency. Two recent articles (Siegel 2011; Blyth 2012) discuss Renandya and Farrell's research (2011) on extensive listening (EL). EL here refers to learners doing a lot of easy, comprehensible, and enjoyable listening practice such as listening to audio books or radio programmes. Due to the fact that EL is a comparatively new idea, its theoretical framework is underdeveloped; there has been little hard evidence supporting the effect of EL on improving L2 listening competence. The present study is based upon the well-documented literature of extensive reading, and extends from this to look at the effect of EL on the development of listening fluency. Listening fluency involves listeners processing aural input automatically and also reaching a reasonable degree of comprehension. However, to reach this level in an L2 context is by no means easy, and it requires regular practice and abundant exposure to spoken language over time (Rost 2006). Although Cambourne (1981) maintains that L2 reading and listening are more similar than different, the principles of reading comprehension cannot be applied directly to listening without some modification.

Although second language listening has become a rather active area of research in the past ten years, some topics such as listening fluency development and extensive listening (EL) have not received much attention. The purpose of the present study is to examine the levels of listening support that might be needed to facilitate L2 learners’ listening fluency development. Sixty-nine EFL college students completed a full intervention through one of the three modes: (1) listening only (LO), (2) reading only (RO), and (3) reading while listening plus listening only (RLL). Ten level-1, 10 level-2 and 8 level-3 (audio) graded readers were used as the study materials within three 13-week periods. Listening tests were given before the intervention (pre-test) and after they finished each level of the texts (post-tests 1, 2 and 3). The research questions addressed effect sizes of the scores’ changes from the pre-test to each of the post-tests in each group on their comprehension of practised and unpractised texts. The results show that in comprehending the practised texts, the LO and RLL groups could comprehend the more complicated texts at faster speech rates and also maintain higher levels of comprehension. When listening to the unpractised texts, the RLL group could do as well as they did on the practised texts, but the LO group could process the more difficult texts at faster speech rates without decreasing their comprehension levels. As predicted, the RO group performed poorly on the tests. Pedagogical implications for facilitating the effectiveness of extensive listening practice are discussed.

This study investigates the effects on developing L2 listening fluency through doing extended listening-focused activities after reading and listening to audio graded readers. Seventy-six EFL university students read and listened to a total of 15 graded readers in a 15-week extensive listening programme. They were divided into three groups (Group 5, n = 30; Group 10, n = 20; Group 15, n =26) according to the number of post-listening-focused activities they completed. Another group who did not receive extensive listening served as the control group (Group 0, n =39). All participants were given a pre-test containing teacher-developed tests and a full-length simulated Test of English for International Communication (TOEIC) listening test. Similar tests were repeated at the end of the programme. The study addresses the effect size of improvement that students made from listening to audio graded readers and doing post-listening-focused activities, the degree to which students progressed on their TOEIC listening test, and the transferring effect from narrative-type input to conversational-type listening. Results show that the effect size was very small, medium, and very large on the listening improvement for Group 5, Group 10 and Group 15 respectively. On their post-TOEIC tests, Groups 5, 10 and 15 made approximately 2, 9 and 16 points out of 100 respectively. Finally, only Group 15 demonstrated some transfer effect from narrative to conversational input type of listening. This study also discussed the reasons low-level learners need to read many more texts to see more significant improvement.