Authentic Materials and Listening Skills

Abstract

This current study aimed to determine students' perspectives on the influence of authentic materials on listening skills. This descriptive study was applied to a population of 60 undergraduate participants (16 males and 44 females, ages between 18 and 24) with an intermediate level of English. Data was collected through a survey with 20 items, each containing 5 options on a Likert scale. This survey was validated by Cronbach' Alpha coefficient (0,727) and approved by five experts in the field who showed acceptance of each survey item and values ranged between 0,80 and 1 in the Aiken's V coefficient. To develop this research, three research questions related to the objectives were formulated focusing on the following categories: Types of authentic materials, types of authentic listening activities, and listening subskills. Firstly, the results showed that the kind of authentic materials most used by the students are auditory materials (authentic interviews, authentic conversations, songs and music, podcasts, and radio) as well as audio-visual materials (TV shows, commercials, and YouTube) due to the daily use they have with those types of materials in their native language. In addition, several activities were found to improve students’ listening skills such as, fill-gaps activities or role-plays in the classroom. Finally, it was found that students have developed several subskills such as extensive listening, intensive listening, listening for specific information, and attitude inference to improve their listening skills. Interestingly, extensive listening proved to be the most developed by students, which means that students like to listen to audios about interests outside the classrooms as part of their academic progress and language development.