DOI: 10.14457/tu.the.2022.1682
title: An investigation of EFL university learners’ listening strategies in an English listening test with four task types

description: This study aims to explore the listening strategies used by EFL learners when completing the TOEIC listening mock test, investigate listening strategies that lead to success in answering the questions, and find out how differently the high, intermediate and low levels of proficiency learners used listening strategies in four different task types. This mixed method study was divided into quantitative and qualitative phases. The convenience sampling method was employed to recruit the participants for quantitative data collection. There were 131 participants who enrolled in the Business Listening and Speaking course and Preparation for English Proficiency Test course. They took a TOEIC listening mock test with 100 items. After they finished the listening test, the adopted version of a metacognitive and cognitive strategies questionnaire was immediately distributed to the participants. The listening test scores were used to group the participants into different levels of proficiency that were high, intermediate, and low. After that, the purposive sampling method was used to select the participants for the stimulated recall protocol interview. There were 23 participants that consisted of 7 participants from high level of proficiency, 6 participants from intermediate level of proficiency and 10 participants from low level of proficiency. The verbal reports from each of the 23 participants were coded by using taxonomy and each strategy used was grouped according to the listening task types. The results from the questionnaire showed that high level proficiency learners employed more metacognitive strategies than cognitive listening strategies, whereas intermediate level proficiency learners used equal numbers of metacognitive and cognitive listening strategies in the listening section, and low level proficiency learners employed cognitive listening strategies over metacognitive listening strategies. The results from the stimulated recall protocol interview revealed that high, intermediate and low levels proficiency learners employed similar strategies in the listening test. In the photo task, the learners applied identification of words and chunks, hypothesis formation, general deduction and monitoring against the question strategies. In the question and response task, the three levels of proficiency learners used identification of words and chunks, hypothesis formation, match lexis heard to lexis in the question and monitoring against the questions strategies. In the conversation task, where the learners needed to listen to a short conversation between two speakers and answer three main idea and details questions, the learners employed monitoring against the question+ hypothesis formation+ identification of words and chunks which were used in harmony, hypothesis formation, task evaluation, elaboration and world knowledge. For the last task, which was a short talk spoken by one speaker and the learners answered three questions according to the passage from the talk, the strategies the learners used were monitoring against the question + hypothesis formation+ and identification of words and chunks in combination, elimination deduction, inferencing and match lexis heard to lexis in the question. It was observed that the three levels of proficiency learners employed similar strategies used in their listening test, however the frequency and quality of the strategies used in order to help them arrive at the answer were completely different. The learners whose linguistic knowledge was limited struggled in applying listening strategies in order to solve listening problems, while learners whose linguistic knowledge was automatic were able to comprehend the listening passage and apply appropriate strategies synchronously to solve listening problems.