The Effects of Listening Support on the Listening Performance of EFL Learners

Listening comprehension is a difficult skill for foreign language learners to develop and for their teachers to assess. In designing suitable listening tests, teachers can provide various forms of support to reduce the demands of the task for the test takers. This study investigated the effects of four types of listening support: previewing the test questions, repetition of the input, providing background knowledge about the topic, and vocabulary instruction. The research involved a classroom-based experiment with 160 students enrolled in a required English listening course at a college in Taiwan. The results showed that the most effective type of support overall was providing information about the topic, followed by repetition of the input. The learners' level of listening proficiency had a significant interaction effect, particularly in the case of question preview. Vocabulary instruction was the least useful form of support, regardless of proficiency level. The findings are generally consistent with the results of the small number of previous studies in this area but there is certainly scope for further investigation.