Abstract:

Listening skill in English as a foreign language (EFL) teaching and learning is one of the major obstacles that prevent learners of EFL from successful communication. This research is based on a series of previous studies. The first one was about the analysis of Cambridge Assessment: English exams taken by adults (test takers over 30 y.o.). It was evident from test results that one of the major problems was listening. This led to the second, neuropsychological study, which was devoted to finding out a specific problem in listening among the test-takers. The major finding was that test takers struggle mainly with phonology and insufficient capacity of the short-term memory. This research is focused on addressing listening problems with the help of dynamic assessment following Vygotsky’s theory of the zone of actual development (ZAD) and the zone of proximal development (ZPD). The number of participants of this study was 28, aged 30 and older. The experiment ran for 2 months, two 1,5 hour listening sessions a week addressing the development of the short-term memory and phonology in EFL. Three past-papers of First Certificate in English listening were used to measure the results of the experiment: Test A was used at the beginning, Test B was used both at the beginning and at the end of the experiment and Test C was used to test the transfer of the targeted skill. The results of the experiment complied with the Vygotsy’s theory about the instability of the Zone of Proximal Development. Test B demonstrated the highest increase in the listening score: from 26% at the beginning of the experiment to 35.5% at the end for the experimental group and from 25% to 27,5% in the control group; whereas the results of testing in case of tests of A and C was more modest and did not differ greatly from one another. However, dynamic assessment employed in this study allowed us to find out specific problems in learning EFL: adults struggled with cultural differences between their native culture and that of the speakers in listening tasks, which prevented them from comprehending the input correctly; linguistic features of the learned language (L2), like different ways of expressing negation, also were an obstacle in speech comprehension. These findings lead to conclusion that L2 teaching should be age-sensitive and mother tongue/culture specific. This area of research needs further development and study, as dynamic assessment seems to be a promising way of developing listening skill in foreign language teaching by adults.

Keywords:

Listening, English as a foreign language, dynamic assessment.