Speechyard platform and the listening skills

Abstract

Listening is one of the most important skills. Only with effective listening can you understand others; enhance relationships; persuade or sell effectively; lead and inspire a team; or learn from others. Moreover, listening skill is among the most challenging skills for students because they must distinguish between different accents and pronunciations. The purpose of the current research is to analyze how Speechyard platform develops listening skills. The research work used a quantitative approach. Since, the quantitative part of the research was represented through the analysis of the data collected from a standardized test A2 Flyers from Cambridge. This information was used to determine the range of listening skills of the participants. Furthermore, the participants of this research were 26 students, 12 male, and 14 females, from ninth basic level EGB at “Unidad Educativa Picaihua”. The interventions focused on the use of the Speechyard platform to develop listening skills, and it was necessary to apply a pre-test and post-test to gather information about the student’s improvement. The results were an increase of 7,94 over 10 points in the post-test. In conclusion, the use of the Speechyard platform improved the listening skills of the students because through many exercises listening, it helped to understand different accents, encouraged the self-learning, and motivated students to practice on this platform. Also, students had at their disposition many didactic activities which was another factor that influenced the results.