A study on improving listening as a language skill atsecondary school

The purpose of this study is to improve listening skills of 7th grade studentsby means of a training programme which is composed of different activities. Themain aim of the study is to show that listening is a language skill which can beimproved, and that students? listening skills can be enhanced via various activities.The research has been carried out in 7th grade classes of Ankara YenimahalleHarzemsahlar Primary School and Mamak Metehan Primary School. There are two7th grade classes in each of these schools. A ten-item Listening Test was preparedwith the opinions of listening experts to determine the listening level of students.Headings of the items in the test are as follows: Story, Subway Announcements,News- Weather Reports, Drawing, Interview, Road Directions, Radio Theatre,Advertisements, Dictation, and Mathematical Shopping Problems. These headingswere determined by considering the listening situations which students mightencounter both at school and in life outside the school.The Listening Test was composed of open-ended questions, gap-fillingquestions, multiple choice questions, and exercises which required drawing,calculations and marking. Statistic Package for Social Science Programme was usedto evaluate the gathered data.Students were asked to listen to tape recordings in some of the items of thetest, and in some others, texts were read to them by their teachers. After the pre-testvipractice, one of the classrooms in each school was chosen as the test group and theother was defined as the control group. This choice was done randomly. There were45 students in the test group, and 32 students were in the control group. There wasnot a statistically meaningful difference between the average pre-test grades ofstudents in the test and control groups. This result shows that these two groups weresimilar before the implementation in terms of their listening skill grades.After the pre-test, the students in the test group were provided a two-hourtraining programme for 4 weeks. Throughout these training sessions, students wereinformed about the points they should pay attention to in the pre-listening, whilelisteningand post-listening phase, and note- taking strategies, etc. These pieces ofinformation were demonstrated with practical examples. Lessons were carried out asusual in the control group. It was observed at the end of the training sessions thatthere was an increase in the average grades of both groups. However, the increase inthe grades of the test group was distinctly higher than the increase observed in thecontrol group. This difference which is in favor of the test group proved to bestatistically meaningful as well. This result shows that training on listening skillsimproves listening competency of students.