Using authentic materials to develop listening comprehension in the

Akiko: “If-if he and she speaks slowly, I can understand. But they-they speak fast, I can’t understand.”


Cheng: “Sometimes they use the informal word we- that I never learned, for example, the teens. Yeah, and many other words that never learned in the books before. This will just the Americans like to use them, yeah.”
Choi: “Uh yes, fast-fast and difficult words . . . outside people is fast-faster and uh cor- correct-correcting, not cor- not correcting-not correct. Ah, uh tone-tone-tone uh speaking tone is difficult.”
Enrique: “They very speak quickly.”
Kim: “I feel a little bit difficult because the, uh like, teacher the way she teach us is more slowly and then it’s more general. It’s like some kind of uh culture of them,
and very difficult for me. Pronunciation is sometimes very some-some people
is different. Very fast, sometimes I understand, but sometimes I don’t
understand. . . . Because we-we heard about everyday is [teacher], right? . . .
adapted to, yeah, to speaking about by [teacher]; but another say, and then it’s difficult for me, but it’s try to another-another-another pronunciation.”
Sonya: “The different about the English the- here the English speaking very well, but in the supermarket and the mall especially, the many- there are many confused . . .
very fast. Sometimes they are speaking different the pronunciation, maybe.”
Yuki: “Uh, the some, uh, native American people use uh slang. Yeah, but I-I uh I didn’t learn slang. I just uh infor- uh, formal English. But I-I want to learn slang, informal-informal English.”


Results from the interview with teacher. The fundamental purpose of the interview with teacher was to obtain information, from the teacher’s observations, about the students’ English-language listening ability. While 3 out of 7 students were newcomers, the teacher had the others as former students from previous semester. On the basis of students' class attendance (see Appendix G), their ability to respond in class, together with their approach to native speakers, the teacher perceived that 4 out of 7 students (57%): Cheng, Enrique, Sonya, and Yuki, had clearly made a progress in their English-listening ability. Three other students whose listening progress was not obviously noticed by the teacher were: Akiko, who came after the class had already

started; Choi and Kim, who were repeatedly absent from the language class. Evidently, these three students had less time with classroom listening experiences than the rest of students in the same class.

The teacher’s viewpoints about individual student's improvement in listening- comprehension ability are the following:

“Well, Enrique, his progress is pretty clear. I’m not sure how much he understood before, he just couldn’t respond. I suspect he understands more now, but particularly

his, that affective filter has gone down. He was so nervous and uptight ”
“Um, Cheng had a lot of knowledge, uh, upstairs, uh, that could really come out and we hadn’t thought about placing her in advanced level class. So, she was able to
make real rapid progress. Um, and that’s, you know, usually what you see particularly in Asian students who come in with high TOEFL scores and no listening skills.”
“Yuki was a real good student her own desire to acquire knowledge has pretty
much guided her in everything she does. So, she’s a more natural and, therefore, more successful learner than some other students who felt pressure to succeed on test all their lives and have maybe lost touch with that natural innate desire to learn. Um, so she-she, uh, she does very well in an authentic situation. She’s not afraid to put herself on the line.”
“Um, Sonya understands a lot more than she did last semester. She just has so many production problems; her speech is still almost incomprehensible, and I think it’s partially because of her age . . . she has so many, uh, so many Portuguese ways of-of speaking that it’s really hard to understand.”
“Akiko came in at the end and, I think, she’s still feeling overwhelmed . . . she’s gonna need a few more weeks to relax and get comfortable as always. Um, and so, I can’t really guess what her progress has been.”
“Choi, um, she’s pretty typical Korean lady, I believe. You know, she wants to appear docile and submissive . . . um, she simple hasn’t had enough exposure to English to make progress like Yuki, for example. She speaks English two hours a day and

sometimes not everyday in the week . . . she hasn’t much, uh, so many fewer opportunities than everybody else to work on the skills.”

“Um, I think Kim is worried about Korea, and he’s worried about his own future. .
. . He’s got a lot of emotional things keeping him from coming to class and being consistent. And his work habits, he generally doesn’t prepare his lessons.”


Results from the class observation. The purpose of class observation was to obtain information about the natures and the proportions of aural authentic input that was provided in the ESL classroom. The results from 5-week class observation revealed that, of the 25-day language program, 85% of the total class hours delivered English spoken by native speakers of the language: 55% through the teacher, 10% through mini-lecture tapes, 8% through guest speakers, 8% through people met on field trips, and 4% through motion pictures. The remaining 15% of the entire class time was spent on other activities including working on exercises, listening to classmates reading, and listening to classmates answering questions.
The analyzed transcripts of five-week class observation also revealed a variation of classroom behaviors indicating the students’ listening and understanding of the target language. Classroom behaviors were coded and grouped into major categories: following instructions, answering questions, not answering questions / not following instructions, nodding or shaking head as listening, and smiling and/or laughing as listening.
The first category, following instructions, consisted of classroom events in which the students performed to demonstrate their understanding of the teacher's directions, such as introducing themselves to guest speakers, pronouncing vocabulary after the teacher, and taking notes while listening to the mini-lectures. The second category included events that the students verbally, with a single word, phrase or sentence, or non- verbally, with a head nodding or a head shaking, answered the teacher’s questions.
Another category contained the circumstances that the students did not accurately respond to the teacher's questions or directions; for instance, the students repeated the definition given when the teacher asked for a word for that definition. The next category included

events that the students indicated an understanding of the message by nodding, shaking head, or using paralinguistic cues such as “uh huh,” and “yeah.” The last category consisted of occurrences that the students smiled or laughed to signify their listening and understanding of the heard message. Using transcripts of the class observation, frequency counts of coded events related to each category were totalled. The outcomes are presented in Table 5.