Developing critical listening skills among middle school students

This study seeks to develop critical listening skills among middle school students. The first part of this study presents a review of the relevant literature on critical thinking and classifies the skills covered by critical listening based on the classifications in the literature. The following skills were classified: identifying the subject of the text, determining the main idea of the text, figuring out whether the narrative of the text is biased or not, finding the subjective/objective expressions in the text, inferring from the text, evaluating the subject of the text, evaluating the consistency of the text, evaluating the argumentative statements in the text, finding the propaganda statements in the text. The second part of this study consists of the selection of the school and the content for the training. The training in this study designed as a mixed-methods study covered a total of 40-course hours. The training was performed with 7th-grade students in two different classrooms in Mithatpaşa Middle School in the district of Adapazarı, city of Sakarya, Turkey. Through random assignment, one of the classrooms was selected as the experimental group while the other represented the control group. This study aimed to develop the skills of critical listening among the students and examined the effectiveness of the training on their critical listening, listening, and critical thinking disposition. For this reason, in the study, listening comprehension test, critical listening test and critical thinking disposition scale were used to collect quantitative data. The qualitative data of the study were derived from interviews and the researcher's diary. SPSS 20 program was used in the analysis of quantitative data and content analysis was used in the analysis of qualitative data. According to the results of the research, a significant difference was found in the critical listening total scores of the experimental group students in favor of the posttest scores. In addition, a significant difference was found in favor of posttest scores in the skills of the experimental group students in identifying the subject of the text, determining the main idea of the text, figuring out whether the narrative of the text is biased or not, finding the subjective/objective expressions in the text, inferring from the text, evaluating the subject of the text, evaluating the consistency of the text, evaluating the argumentative statements in the text, finding the propaganda statements in the text within the scope of critical listening skills. Also, while there was a significant difference for the experimental group in the post-test scores that reflected their listening and critical thinking disposition. The interviews and the researcher's diary used in the qualitative part of the study supported the quantitative findings of the study. These results show that critical listening practices and education provided with students in the research improve students' critical listening skills, listening skills and critical thinking tendencies.