Many scholars and teachers in EFL education should agree that compared with reading and writing, listening has received much less attention. This brief article discusses important gaps existing in EFL listening and overall proficiency development. It presents the case for a greater focus on sounds and actual listening in the classroom and spoken…

In today's environment of growing class sizes due to the prevalence of online and e-learning systems, providing one-to-one instruction and feedback has become a challenging task for teachers. Anyhow, the dialectical integration of instruction and assessment into a seamless and dynamic activity can provide a continuous flow of assessment…

Based on the assumption that individual learner factors are context-dependent, this exploratory study examined whether differences in two learning environments (Denmark and Spain) have a differential influence on a set of learner factors that have together been previously identified as important in second language (L2) research, specifically,…

Whether visual information belongs in second language (L2) listening tests has long been a subject for scholarly debate, with L2 learners' performance on and perceptions of video-based tests being the primary sources of evidence. The research into L2 teachers' perceptions, however, is scarce, as is the research into stakeholders' views of content…

While it is well-established that listeners judge accents different from their own, and that this listener bias has pervasive consequences to the speakers, we have only offered a cursory attention to understand the nature of this accent bias. This paper explores listeners' judgments, ratings, and qualitative comments associated with psychosocial,…

Speech perception involves fusion of multiple sensory inputs, but fusion is not automatic, likely depending on several external and internal factors (e.g., attention, noise, age). In this study, we exploited a specific paradigm in which a short audiovisual context made of coherent or incoherent speech material is displayed before an incongruent…

The processing advantage of Subject-gapped relative clause (SRC) versus Object-gapped relative clause (ORC) has been advocated by competing processing accounts. Using a self-paced listening paradigm, this study investigates what Chinese RC online processing asymmetry looks like under concurrent memory load manipulation. Both On-line listening…

This study investigated the possible effect of podcasting on Iranian intermediate EFL learners' listening comprehension skill. A total number of seventy EFL learners were selected based on their performance on Oxford Placement Test (OPT). Then, they were divided into two groups (one experimental and one control group). Pre-test of listening was…

Although research on listening skills has been frequently conducted to discover the nature of listening comprehension, there is little study about listening genre competence which is related with knowledge about listening text types. In order to find out whether listening skills and listening genre competence are related, cognitive diagnosis, a…

Four papers by Brandon Kramer, Tohru Matsuo, Aaron Sponseller, Young Ae Kim, Suzuka Nishiyama, and Stuart McLean; Stuart Benson and Naheen Madarbakus-Ring; Michael McGuire and Jennifer Larson-Hall; and Atsushi Mizumoto, Geoffrey Pinchbeck, and Stuart McLean were presented in the morning session of the 2021 Vocabulary SIG Symposium held in Kyoto,…

This study investigates the Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) implementation and its pedagogical impact in enhancing students' English listening skills in English as a Medium of Instruction (EMI) contexts across Asian countries. Data were collected from 147 English language teachers from Thailand, Malaysia, Vietnam, Indonesia, Taiwan, China, and the…

The current study reports the results of a project aimed at assessing L2 listening comprehension by drawing on two approaches to dynamic assessment: interventionist and interactionist. The former approach was actualized by providing two graduated hints which were fixed and standardized for all test takers while the latter was actualized by asking…

This article investigates the effect of different accents on high- and low-proficiency second language (L2) learners. It begins with testing the English listening proficiency of Chinese students and then compares the influence of three accented English (a British accent, an Australian accent and an Indian accent) on their listening scores.…

Listener background variables have been recognized as potential contributors to language evaluation bias. This continuum of trait-irrelevant factors creates implications from the L2 classroom to integration in the target language community. This study examined how L2 Spanish learners' listener background factors including ethnicity, heritage…

In this study, we present the development of individualized feedback for a large-scale listening assessment by combining standard setting and cognitive diagnostic assessment (CDA) approaches. We used the performance data from 3,358 students' item-level responses to a field test of a national EFL test primarily intended for tertiary-level EFL…