DEVELOPING A WEB-BASED LEARNING MEDIA ON MAHAROH ISTIMA IN MAN 1 KOTA KEDIRI

The use of learning media on Maharoh Istima is very essential to promote students’ listening skills. Learning media used by teachers used to be ineffective due to the students’ heterogenous listening proficiency. That’s why, it is needed to develop an autonomous and flexible learning media to promote students’ listening skill which can be implemented anytime and anywhere. This Research and Development study employed a developmental method called ADDIE. The media produced was validated by media and material experts using a Likert Scale for analysis. The study produced a website http://belajaristima.com/ validated by the media expert in 92,30 % and the material expert in 97,27 %. From the validation, it is said that the media is valid and can be implemented as a learning media.Keywords:Maharoh Istima, Website, Learning Media.

Assessing the Listening Proficiency of ESL Students in a Pandemic

The debate as to whether or not listening skills can be used as a testing device for measuring language proficiency—particularly grammatical competence—has been quite a controversial issue for the longest time. Yet, current research findings have not been entirely conclusive and sufficient either way. Hence, this particular study was conducted to address the problem given the existing research gap in the field. Firstly, the investigation sought to determine the listening proficiency level of 40 ESL freshmen in a state university for grammatical distinctions utilizing the mean score. Secondly, it identified the learners’ common errors and difficulties encountered in listening for grammatical distinctions using frequency and sentence analysis. To validate the results of the communicative listening test, a writing composition exercise was duly administered. The results showed that the respondents have very good proficiency levels in listening for grammatical distinctions in terms of inflectional patterns of singular and plural forms of subjects or predicates and good proficiency levels in terms of inflectional patterns for present and past tense of verbs. However, it was found that there still exist some problems in terms of more complex syntactic constructions. Results revealed that the respondents were confused and disrupted in some listening items when the test sentence is embedded with intervening words, phrases, or subordinate clauses. This problem may actually be indicative of socio-psycholinguistic factors to retain what they learned in an academic setting, but outside of it, the intervening words easily disrupted their concentration and memory. Lastly, the new normal caused by the COVID 19 pandemic has forced educators and students into a new learning environment: the online classroom. In recognition of this, the test was administered online, and the results similarly processed but with consideration of the electronic platform as a moderating variable. This shift in the modality of instruction affects ways of learning that have not necessarily been plotted before, as observed by EFL and ESL experts like Brown (2000) and Richards (2016). Thus, while it is not the primary focus of the study, this paper nevertheless highlights this new socio-technological aspect as a crucial moderator of listening assessment for better grammatical competence.

The effects of prosody instruction on listening comprehension in an EAP classroom context

In many English language teaching contexts, listening activities resemble listening comprehension tests. Scholars have argued that this product-oriented approach is not particularly effective in helping learners improve their listening skills and have advocated for the inclusion of instruction that targets specific features of spoken language. The current study tested these claims in the context of an English-for-academic-purposes (EAP) listening and speaking course. Sixty-four post-secondary learners of English were randomly assigned to one of two groups. In addition to their regularly scheduled listening activities, one group received 100 minutes of instruction for two prosodic features (paratone and prosodic phrasing), while the other group received an equal amount of product-oriented listening instruction. After the instructional treatment, learners in the prosody group outperformed those in the product-oriented group on comprehension of the target prosodic features, and on general listening proficiency tests. It is argued that short periods of instruction targeting prosodic features can improve the effectiveness of traditional product-oriented EAP listening instruction.

L2-L1 noncognate masked translation priming as a task-specific phenomenon

The masked translation priming effect was examined in Chinese–English bilinguals using lexical decision and semantic categorization tasks in an effort to understand why the two tasks seem to produce different patterns of results. A machine-learning approach was used to assess the participant-based factors that contribute to the sizes of translation priming effects in these tasks. As expected, the participant-based factors that predicted translation priming effects did vary across tasks. Priming effects in lexical decision were associated with higher self-rated listening, reading, and writing abilities in English. Priming effects in semantic categorization were associated with more frequent use of English in daily life, spoken English proficiency, and self-rated listening proficiency in English. These results are discussed within the framework of Multilink, the logic of which is then expanded in an attempt to account for these task differences.

Listening self-efficacy beliefs, L2 listening proficiency, and listening strategy training

Self-efficacy plays an important role in language learners’ performances in language learning. Studies report that explicit teaching of strategies, self-efficacy, and better learner performance are interdependent concepts. This entails the fact that language teachers should focus on the first two in order to increase the learners’ performance. The aim of this study is to find out how teaching cognitive and metacognitive strategies affect EFL learners’ performances and self-efficacy beliefs in listening comprehension tasks. Ninety students participated in this study, thirty of whom were part of the control group. Their listening self-efficacy and listening proficiency were measured before and after a four-week training. During the intervention sessions, instructors taught cognitive and metacognitive strategies in an explicit way, which included teacher modeling and teacher feedbacks. The results revealed that learners’ listening proficiency scores increased while their self-efficacy scores did not change significantly after the training. These findings led to the conclusion that low self-efficacy does not necessarily lead to low listening proficiency. Another finding was that teaching only cognitive and metacognitive strategies does not help learners with their self-efficacy in a short time period. Implications and suggestions for L2 listening are provided considering the results of the study.

An Experimental Study of the Effect of Content Schema on English Listening Testing of Non-English Majors

Listening occupies one of the most preliminary parts in foreign language learning and becomes more and more important. Pre-listening process of listening comprehension owns two models, bottom-up and top-down. The latter that emphasizes the introduction of background knowledge is tightly related to content schema. The aim of the study is to examine the impact of content schema on listening comprehension and to find whether there is difference of the impact of content schema on students of different levels of listening comprehension by conducting an experiment. About 189 participants from Zhejiang University were divided into control group (CG) and experiment group (EG). Both the two groups did pretests, tests and questionnaires. CG and EG were separately divided into high- and low-level groups based on the pretest scores. Independent sample T-test was used to analyze data. The results showed that content schema negatively affected listening comprehension and it had stronger impact on students with low listening proficiency.

Foreign Language Listening Anxiety in an Academic Listening Class

In the process of teaching listening, anxiety is believed as a negative factor contributing to the students’ poor listening comprehension and quite possibly the affective factor that the most persistently hinders the learning process. Thus, investigating its existence and delving its factors become salient in order to help the students overcome their listening learning barriers. This present study attempts to depict the condition of the students’ listening anxiety in an Academic Listening (AL) class in an Indonesian tertiary context. 20-items of Foreign Language Listening Anxiety’s (hereafter, FLLA) questionnaire were administered to 97 students taking that course. Having finished analyzing the levels of students’ listening anxiety, in-depth interviews were conducted to four students who were considered having high listening anxiety to disclose the underlying factors. The research result revealed three pivotal issues; a) 54.6% of the students had a relatively high level of listening anxiety, 18.5% had moderate listening anxiety, and 26.8% had a low level of listening anxiety; b), 75% of the chosen measured items showed an extreme level of the students’ listening anxiety, and c) the major factor contributing the listening anxiety was inadequate listening proficiency involving the inability to deal with the rapid speech rate and range of lexical choices.