Fostering Students’ Listening Comprehension through Listening to Short Stories as Authentic Materials

Abstract

Listening is considered as one of the important skills in foreign language learning.It provides learners with a foundation for all aspects of language and cognitive development. However, it is neglected by many teachers .The main goal of this investigation is to examine the effectiveness of using short stories as authentic materials to fost er students listening comprehension.An experiment was conducted with second year English students at Abdelhafid Boussouf University Center to see whether there is a significant change in students’ listening comprehension after listening to audio short stor ies as an extensive listening .The experimental group participants who received the listening instructions have shown a higher mean scores of the results in comparison to the control group. The second mean used in this study was the teachers’ interview ,it aims at investigating the teachers’ beliefs and points of views concerning the use of short audio stories as authentic materials in EFL classrooms to improve students listening comprehension. The findings of the interview reveal that teachers at the English department, at Abdelhafid Boussouf University Center, are facing many difficulties when using authentic materials as listening inputs in EFL , and most of them are not aware of the effectiveness of using short audio stories for improving students’ listening comprehension.In addition to that ,they suggest to incorporate short audio stories in teaching listening because they have a great impact o n students listening comprehension.Furthermore, the results obtained from the two research tools confirm that using short audio stories as authentic materials would enhance listening comprehension of second year students .