The importance of Situational Context in Teaching Listening Skill: A Linguistics Approach

The study was conducted to find out the effectiveness of situational context and task-based syllabi on teaching listening skill to pre-intermediate EFL students. Research method was based on the pre-test and post-test design. The population of the study was 30 Preintermediate EFL students majoring English Language Teaching (ELT) at pars Institute in Tehran , Iran. They were selected based on a proficiency test taken among 50 students. The pre-test was administrated to the participants extracted from Tactics for Listening: Expanding (Richards, 2005) and American Kernel Lesson (Neil, Kingsbury & Yeadon, 1978) for Taskbased and Situational context-based syllabi, respectively. Paired Sample t-test was used to show the difference between the participants’ listening performance in the pre and post-tests. The two groups were compared to their own due to two different materials which were chosen. The significance of difference between the scores of groups at 0.05 levels was tested. Results revealed that Task-based group outperformed the Situational context-based group since the difference between the pre and post-tests was significant while the difference in the Situational context-based group was not significant (p<0.05). Implications of the study may be used to provide the pre-intermediate learners with effective listening tasks in listening and speaking classes.

Keywords:

Situational context , Task-based Syllabi , Listening Skill