| University-bound ESL students need strong listening comprehension skills in order to gain greater access to oral texts and to become successful listeners and learners in their academic courses. Listening and comprehending authentic English as it is presented in academic lectures is often quite challenging for ESL students since negotiating meaning with the speaker is typically unavailable during lectures. Despite the importance of understanding real English, or English as it is spoken by native speakers for native speakers, few ESL students have been exposed to a sufficient amount of aural authentic input in English in their ESL training. Consequently, once ESL students are enrolled in academic courses, they often find themselves unprepared to cope with the academic listening material in the form of lectures that comprises a major part of their university learning.; This descriptive and exploratory study examined the outcomes of aural authentic texts on the listening comprehension ability of four adult ESL students who were enrolled in a nine-week advanced ESL listening course at a large private university in the United States. The subjects' primary purpose for taking the listening course was to become better prepared for the academic listening they would participate in once they enrolled in their academic courses the following semester. This study also sought to identify the learning strategies advanced ESL students used the most when faced with aural authentic texts in the listening course, and to examine students' attitudes towards learning the English language in this way. The advanced ESL listening course employed audio recordings of live conversations on topics of high interest to students. Data collection included classroom observations, face-to-face interviews with the students and the instructor, and two questionnaires: a self-evaluation questionnaire and a learning strategy questionnaire. Results from this study indicated that the use of aural authentic texts in the advanced ESL listening course increased students' level of comfort when communicating in English, increased students' listening comprehension ability, and increased students' motivation to seek opportunities to listen to aural authentic language outside the classroom. The students also gained a greater awareness of the learning strategies: cognitive, metacognitive, and socioaffective, that they employed most when dealing with aural authentic texts, as well as their strengths and weaknesses as listeners and as learners. Lastly, students' attitudes towards learning English in this way improved as they found themselves more successful in comprehending features of real language such as contractions, reductions, and elisions in English. |
