Using authentic materials to develop listening comprehension in the

CHAPTER FIVE

DISCUSSION, CONCLUSIONS, AND RECOMMENDATIONS
This chapter discusses the results of the present study. Summary of the study, conclusions, recommendations for future research, and implications for teaching are also described.


Summary of the Study
The primary research question presented in this study was the following:
What are the influences of aural authentic materials on the listening comprehension in students of English as a second language?
Two secondary research questions addressed in the study were

1. 
   What kinds of learning strategies are most frequently used by ESL students listening to aural authentic materials in the classroom?
   
2. 
   What are the influences of aural authentic materials on ESL students' attitudes towards learning English?
   

Considering the analyzed data and using the proposed research questions as a guide, the summaries of the present study were as follows.

1. 
   The implementation of aural authentic materials in the ESL classroom helped increase students’ comfort level and self-confidence to listen to the target language.
   

2. 
   Listening comprehension in ESL students appeared to have improved, especially in the classroom setting, after they had exposed to aural authentic materials in the classroom.
   
3. 
   ESL students used various learning strategies when they listened to aural authentic materials. Frequently used strategies were paying attention when someone was speaking and asking people to slow down or say again.
   
4. 
   To practice and improve their listening ability outside classroom, ESL students generally watched television.
   
5. 
   Implementing aural authentic materials in the ESL classroom helped increase ESL students’ motivation to expose themselves to the target language.
   

Discussion of Results
Due to the small number of students in the research study, the particular learning situation, and the limited access to the students (see Appendix M), the interpretation of the results are limited. Additionally, to the extent that the students may or may not accurately reflect the entire population of ESL students, the interpretation of the results from this study should not be generalized. The following section discusses the findings related to the proposed research questions concerning the influences of aural authentic materials, the learning strategy use, and the attitudes towards language learning.


Authenticity of the Listening Materials
Authenticity refers to the degree to which language teaching materials have the qualities of natural speech (Richards et al., 1992). Some people maintain that a text generated by a native speaker of the language is considered authentic. Some assert that texts created to seem real are authentic. For other people, texts spoken by native speakers for native speakers but were edited for pedagogical purposes are considered authentic (Ring, 1986). Rogers and Medley (1988) use the term “unmodified authentic discourse” to refer to “the language that occurs originally as a genuine act of communication” (p.

467). On the other hand, “language that reflects the features likely to occur in unmodified discourse, but that is produced for pedagogical purposes” is called “simulated authentic discourse” (Rogers & Medley, 1988, p. 467).

Language may be categorized according to degree of authenticity. Ring (1986) determines language as “purely authentic” (p. 205) when it is spontaneously produced by native speakers for the purposes of accomplishing a task. The language is considered less authentic when one participant knows that the situation is being monitored or the speakers are being tape-recorded for teaching purposes. A simulated role-play in which native speakers are given a situation and asked to act it out while being recorded is considered least authentic. Composed conversations that are printed in textbooks for the purposes of teaching specific structures or vocabulary, however, are determined inauthentic (Ring, 1986).
In the current study, the listening materials implemented in the ESL classroom were primarily audio-taped mini-lectures. To the extent that the mini-lectures, presented for a few-minute long, were not real lectures addressed directly to this group of students, neither were they audio-taped of real lectures in a real college lecture hall, these mini- lectures are not considered pure authentic. However, the mini-lectures were not totally scripted materials in which a person had to perform reading something that was written for them. Rather, on the basis of degree of authenticity, the mini-lectures are considered semi-scripted materials because of the fact that they represented the way a real lecturer talks to a real class and that they contained some features of an unplanned spoken discourse, such as redundancy, ungrammatical features, and incomplete sentences. Figure 4 shows the features of authentic materials along the range of authenticity.




A semi-scripted lecture:
A native speaker was given a situation to perform a lecture while being recorded.




A scripted lecture:
A native speaker was given a written paper to read while being recorded.