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.
The cognitive processes elicited by L2 listening test tasks – A validation study