خلاصة:
Abstract Listening plays a significant role in daily communication and educational processes. In spite of its importance, listening has long been the neglected skill in second and foreign language acquisition, research, teaching, and assessment. However, on account of the entire challenges EFL learners encounter in classrooms due to the listening complexity, some pre-listening activities as supports in the procedure of teaching listening are proposed by experts in the field. This research investigated 80 male and female learners in 2 groups of 40, who were selected randomly, to determine whether pre-listening activities have a significant effect on listening comprehension of English texts. It also investigated whether there was a significant difference between male and female learners on pre-listening activities in terms of their effects on the comprehension of English texts. To do this, subjects first took a TOFEL test, which served as a pre-test, to make it possible to have homogeneous learners in a control group and an experimental group. In the experimental group, some pre-listening tasks, through which the learners received general prior information about the content of the listening texts, were performed. Then, they listened to and answered some multiple-choice comprehension questions which asked for the specific information in the listening texts. However, the control group’s listening comprehension tasks were destitute of pre-listening activities. The results of the analysis of the data obtained at the end of the experiment revealed that the experimental group performed significantly better than the control group. It also showed that females outperformed the male group. In other words, the treatments appeared to have a significant effect on the performance of the experimental group (and especially female learners therein) in listening comprehension.
ملخص الجهاز:
This research investigated 80 male and female learners in 2 groups of 40, who were selected randomly, to determine whether pre-listening activities have a significant effect on listening comprehension of English texts.
It also investigated whether there was a significant difference between male and female learners on pre-listening activities in terms of their effects on the comprehension of English texts.
In other words, the treatments appeared to have a significant effect on the performance of the experimental group (and especially female learners therein) in listening comprehension.
Key words: Pre-listening activities, listening comprehension, EFL learners, gender Introduction Listening is the Cinderella skill in second language learning.
Underwood (1989) declares that a pre-listening task can consist of a variety of activities, which can help the teacher to focus the students’ minds on the topic by narrowing down the things that the learners anticipate to hear and stimulating relevant previous knowledge and already known language.
What are the effects of pre-listening activities on the listening comprehension of foreign language learners in general?
Pre-listening activities have no effects on listening comprehension of foreign language learners.
e. experimental and control groups after the performance of pre-listening activities indicate that using pre-listening activities has a significant value on "achievement rate" of EFL learners in the listening comprehension.
In fact, comparing and contrasting the statistical results obtained in the study led to the rejection of the first null hypothesis: “Pre-listening activities have no effects on listening comprehension of foreign language learners.