Narrow Listening as a Method to Improve EFL Learners' Listening Comprehension
Authors: Trần Thị Ngọc Yến, Rob Waring
PASAA - A Journal of Language Teaching and Learning
: 64 : 194-215
Publishing year: 1/2023
The practice of narrow listening was introduced almost 30
years ago (Krashen, 1996), but has not received enough
attention from English language teachers and researchers.
Past research has placed a focus on the combination of
this method and narrow reading, or the use of this method
in teaching languages other than English. This study
explored narrow listening as an independent method to
improve EFL learners’ listening comprehension. The 38
participants in this study were intermediate EFL adult
learners following a general English course. During the
experiment, the treatment group were provided with
narrow listening materials, while the control group were
given listening exercises as homework. A pre-test and a
post-test were used to measure the participants’ listening
comprehension. The results indicated that the treatment
group outperformed the control group on the post-test.
Compared to their control group counterparts, the narrow
listening learners gained significantly greater
comprehension of the oral texts, even those about the
topics they had not practiced during the treatment. The
findings have suggested that narrow listening has a
positive impact on EFL learners’ listening competence and
that repetition in listening is advantageous to language
acquisition.
narrow listening, listening comprehension, input repetition, listening skills, EFL listening
