Developing Listening Comprehension in esl students at the Intermediate Level by Reading Transcripts While Listening: a cognitive Load Perspective

Limitations

Some of the limitations of this study have already been introduced, for example, theauthenticity of the listening passages and the quality of the projector that was used to administerthe listening. Both of these limitations were present in both groups, which mitigates the possiblenegative effect of these issues on the study results. However, although the level or theauthenticity of these listening passages may be in question, these passages were chosen becausethey were from a published curriculum (Cambridge), which makes these listening passages morerepresentative of the possible listening passages used by teachers around the world.The numberof participants in the study was addressed in the results section when talking about the p value,and this limitation was mitigated as much as possible with the partial eta squared value in orderto account for the possible variation in p-values due to the size of the groups. The participantnumbers in studies in the field of language learning are often limited because classroom researchtakes place in existing classes which are usually limited by the size of the classroom, however,furtherstudiesofthiskindcould provideevidencetosupportthesefindings. Another possible limitation is the type of test used for the pre and post-tests as it was not specific to the treatmentused in the study and the CAPE test is generally considered a placement test, however, the intentof this study was to look at the overall listening comprehension gains, and so this test was chosenbecause it was already built into the experience of these students, and it gave an initial score usedinareal-lifeplacementsituation,aswellas apost-testscoreobtainedusingthesameformat.
Another limitation could be the amount of time spent each week in the classroom on RWLactivities. This study provided for two activities (about 30-40 minutes) a week on RWLactivities, and maybe doing more than that per week would make a difference in the overallgains.

ImplicationsforFutureResearch

One idea for future research has already been presented, which would be to do the sametype of study with beginning and/or advanced-level students to examine the effect of RWL onother levels. Another idea for future research would be to study the effect of using listeningpassages at slightly lower proficiency level than the actual level of the students' other languageskills to make up for the difficulty of listening compared to other language skills. Anotherpossible study may be to investigate further the value of reading-only to assist in listeningcomprehension, as pointed out by the Moussa-Inaty (2012) study. Another interesting study thatcould be conducted using this model would be to take into account the writing system of thestudents' native language. When a language learner has to learn a whole new alphabet, that couldbe a factor in how well RWL will help that student. Such a study may help us know if reading-while-listening helps students from Asia, for example, more or less than students with nativelanguages that are Latin based. It would also be interesting to do a study on using RWL ashomeworkassignments.Andfinally,possiblefutureresearchshouldincludecollecting qualitative data that asks questions of the participants to find out what they are thinking as theyparticipate in RWL activities and to further explore the possible effects of cognitive load whenusingRWL.