Enhancement of undergraduates listening skills through listening strategies

Abstract

Enhancement of undergraduate students' listening skills through listening strategies brings a lot of benefits because listening plays very important roles in communication for students at the university level. This study was an attempt to find out how three listening skills: metacognitive listening strategies (adapted from Vandergrift, 2004), cognitive and social listening strategies (partly adapted from Oxford, 2006) could enhance undergraduate students’ listening skills. Thirty undergraduates from a university in Thailand participated in this study. The research instruments were a worksheet, a pre-and post-test, a questionnaire, reflective journals and videoclips. The results showed that majority of the participants gradually enhanced their listeningskills. The result of the post-test was higher than that of the pre-test in terms of listening achievement. Participants obtained a very high score of the social listening strategy followed cognitive and metacognitive strategy. They also obtained high scores from social interaction based on the context studied. The result of the study implied that social interaction should be seriously investigated to see if it had the great impact on listening strategies