Research On The Effectiveness Of Podcasts On High School Students’ Out-of-class Autonomous English Listening Activities

It was clearly put forward in National English Curriculum Standard for Regular High Schools that high school English teachers should pave the way for quality out-ofclass learning activities and provide students with proper supplementary materials to enhance their learning experiences.Podcasts,EFL podcasts,in particular,which are specially designed for EFL learners,have long been recognized as a great tool for improving listening comprehension in a foreign language.Podcast listening materials,are entertaining,timely,authentic,and educational.The integration of podcast listening materials into out-of-class autonomous listening practice can make up for inadequate classroom language input and enrich students’ language learning experience.Therefore,the application of podcasts as high school out-of-class autonomous English listening activities is worth further exploration.I have taken some students in the tenth grade at a high school in Hunan province as research subjects.Participants from the experimental group use podcast listening materials to conduct out-of-class autonomous listening activities;while participants from the control group use traditional listening materials.The total time length of those two kinds of materials offered remains the same.Students are given the autonomy to decide how much time they spend with the materials.Traditional listening materials are presented with only situational dialogues,while an episode of EFL podcasts consists of a dialogue,expert tuition on new vocabularies,expressions and background information,and a keyword review section as well.All of the participants have been required to submit a weekly listening journal.Pretest and posttest are carried out in both the experimental group and the control group.A questionnaire and a follow-up interview are conducted among participants from the experimental group.Data are collected and analyzed by the statistical software SPSS 25.0.The study has been designed to answer the following two questions:1)What are high school students’ attitudes and perceptions toward podcast-based English listening activities?2)Is EFL podcast effective for enhancing EFL high school students’ listening comprehension achievements? If yes,what are the different effects on students with different levels of initial listening comprehension abilities?Going through the process of data sorting,analysis,and interpretation,I have come to the following conclusions:1)Students hold a favorable attitude toward podcast-based listening activities.In light of the authentic language,various topics,and educational expert tuitions on the dialogue,EFL podcast listening materials,comparing to traditional listening materials,are much more compatible with autonomous learning.2)After a 4-month treatment,the attempt that incorporates podcasts into out-ofclass autonomous listening activities has exerted positive influence on students’ overall listening ability.Entertaining and educational EFL podcasts have greatly promoted students’ learning interests and motivations and have led to more time input on autonomous learning,therefore,have lifted students’ grades.The results have shed some lights on mobile-assisted English listening teaching and have offered new ideas for conducting out-of-class listening activities.In light of the above results,combining classroom learning and out-of-class autonomous learning and maximizing the outcome of podcast-based foreign language learning are worth further investigation in future researches.