THE EFFECT OF THE LISTENING TO FORMAL LECTURES ON IRANIAN ADVANCED STUDENTS' LISTENING ABILITY IN TOEFL IBT

Recent studies have suggested that listeners who listen to lectures that offered discourse signaling cues were able to recall more main ideas and more supporting details than listeners who did not. This study examines the effect of listening to formal lectures on Iranian students' listening comprehension ability in TOEFL iBT test. Two groups of students were selected for the purpose of this study. In the control group, students were taught the six necessary skills in TOEFL iBT, actually the listening parts of the TOEFL iBT books. However, The students in the treatment group were taught the authentic skills while they were listening to lectures, the students see the listening task as an authentic one not the one to listen to in order that they can answer the listening tasks only. The results showed that both groups improved significantly over time. However, while being almost the same at the pretest, the two groups significantly differed from each other at the end of the instruction. The treatment group outperformed the control group by almost half a band score on TOEFL iBT listening scoring rubric. This improvement shows that listening to and watching formal lectures can help learners improve their academic listening ability in English.