This study examines common claims associated with shadowing. Studies in Japan conclude that shadowing is effective for improving learners' listening skills. Two common claims are that shadowing is effective for lower-proficiency learners and that it enhances learners' phoneme perception, thus improving listening comprehension skills. The former…

Various forms of pre-listening support, such as the provision of vocabulary and topic information, have been used to help second language (L2) learners better understand what they listen to. Results of studies on the effects of vocabulary support have been mixed. Furthermore, there has been little research on the effects of different quantities of…

The purpose of this study was two-fold: first, it aimed at examining the impact of expository text topics on the listening comprehension of L2 learners; second, it aimed to investigate the impact of macro, micro, and macro-micro discourse markers on the listening comprehension of expository texts by L2 learners. The participants (N =105) were male…

The present study investigated the effectiveness of listening strategy instruction on the metacognitive listening strategies awareness of different EFL learner types (LTs). To achieve this goal, 150 EFL students took part in the study and were taught based on a guided lesson plan regarding listening strategies and a pre-test/post-test design was…

Despite acknowledgment that language-minority children come from a wide variety of home language backgrounds and have a wide range of proficiency in their first (L1) and second (L2) languages, it is unknown whether differences across language-minority children in relative and absolute levels of proficiency in L1 and L2 predict subsequent…

This study tested the effect of Spanish-accented speech on sentence comprehension in children with different degrees of Spanish experience. The hypothesis was that earlier acquisition of Spanish would be associated with enhanced comprehension of Spanish-accented speech. Three groups of 5-6-year-old children were tested: monolingual…

The research reported in this article investigates differential item functioning (DIF) in a listening comprehension test. The study explores the relationship between test-taker age and the items' language domains across multiple test forms. The data comprise test-taker responses (N = 2,861) to a total of 133 unique items, 46 items of which were…

English listening is seen as a vital means of linguistic input for Chinese EFL (English as a Foreign Language) learners, which lays a solid foundation for English learning and communication with English speakers. Besides, with increasing of scores of the listening part in the newly-reformed CET-4 and CET-6 (CET refers to college English test in…

This study investigated the interrelationships among EFL learners' self-efficacy, autonomy and listening comprehension ability. Ninety female learners of intermediate level participated in the study. They were between 16 and 24 years old. In order to obtain the required data on the three variables (i.e., self-efficacy, autonomy, and listening…

This article reports on a small-scale intervention study that examined the impact of a metacognitive approach to listening instruction, in the form of a metacognitive pedagogical cycle, on Chinese university English as a foreign language (EFL) learners' listening proficiency and aspects of metacognitive knowledge over 10 weeks. During each week,…

Foreign language education has now been implemented at the elementary school level across Europe, and early foreign language education has gained traction following language policies set by the European Commission. The long-term effects of an early start, however, have not received ample scientific scrutiny. The present study assessed early…

The present investigation was an attempt to study on the effect of power point enhanced teaching (visual input) on Iranian Intermediate EFL learners' listening comprehension ability. To that end, a null hypothesis was formulated as power point enhanced teaching (visual input) has no effect on Iranian Intermediate EFL learners' listening…

This paper reports a study comparing the effects of vocabulary instruction on recognition and recall through provision of either an L1 equivalent or an L2 (French) definition. Instruction was in the context of a focus-on-meaning listening activity. The study employed a quasi-experimental design, involving 262 Year 9 learners of French in seven…

Because listening has received little attention and the validation of ability scales describing multidimensional skills is always challenging, this study applied a multistage, criterion-referenced approach that used a framework of aligned audio passages and listening tasks to explore the validity of the ACTFL and related listening proficiency…

The first aim of this study was to develop a computer adaptive EFL test (CALT) that assesses test takers' listening and reading proficiency in English with dichotomous items and polytomous testlets. We reported in detail on the development of the CALT, including item banking, determination of suitable item response theory (IRT) models for item…