An analysis of secondary school students' listening skills in terms of socioeconomic variables

This study aims to determine the development status of listening/viewing skills according to socio-economic and cultural conditions. The first section of the study addresses the problem definition, purpose, importance, limitations, assumptions, and definitions of the study. The second section of the study presents the theoretical framework and related studies on listening skills. This section includes a literature review on the subject and discusses the steps necessary to develop listening skills. The third section of the study explains the study model, population and sample, data collection tools, data collection, and data analysis. The fourth section of the study presents the findings of the research. The fifth section draws conclusions based on the findings and focuses on the development of listening skills in light of the results. Recommendations are made based on the results. This study aims to determine whether socioeconomic and cultural structures are determining factors in the listening skills of eighth-grade students. In this context, the correlational survey model was selected as the quantitative method for the research. The study group for this research consists of a total of 180 eighth-grade students from three middle schools in Turgutlu district, Manisa province, with low, medium, and high socioeconomic and cultural levels in the fall semester of the 2023-2024 academic year. Some of the texts used in this research consist of video and audio files obtained from the internet and visual and auditory activities from Assoc. Prof. Dr. Yusuf Doğan's work titled Listening Education. These activities were used with permission. These activities were implemented by playing them to the students using an interactive whiteboard. Over a period of one month, every Monday for four weeks, activities designed by the researcher to assess listening skills were implemented in the three 8th grade classes at each school. After the activities were completed, a personal information form was administered to the students, and the data from the personal information form was transferred to the SPSS 25 software package. Based on the data obtained, an attempt was made to understand whether listening skills were affected by socioeconomic and cultural status. Based on the results obtained, recommendations were made to practitioners (teachers), researchers, the Ministry of National Education, and student parents to use more activities and applications to develop listening skills.