Impact of Podcasts on Listening Skills

Abstract

Despite the significant role that listening plays in foreign language teaching and learning, it has been found difficult to teach and learn. To address this apparent difficulty, the study in hand aims at investigating the impact of podcasts on listening skills. Based on that, it has been hypothesized that if teaching and learning based on podcasts, an improvement in learners’ listening skills will occur. To test this hypothesis, an experimental study has been conducted on 30 Second Year Students of English at Mohammed Seddik Ben Yahia University, Jijel. In addition, two questionnaires are administered to 72 second year students and 10 teachers of Oral Expression to investigate their familiarity, attitudes, and practices in using such a tool in teaching and learning listening skills. The results obtained have shown that the practices of listening skills are relatively inadequate, especially in terms of the amount of time devoted to listening. Even though teachers and students have positive attitudes and acknowledged the importance of podcasts in developing the listening skills, in practice, they have not exploited them to full potential because they rarely used them in their teaching and learning practices. Results from a six-session podcast listening have demonstrated that students have initially average abilities in listening. The experimental group scores have improved significantly after the treatment to above average levels, particularly as far as retention of words is concerned. More listening should be done and recommended to students to help them improve their listening skills that are mainly related to fast rate of speech delivery. According to participants’ preferences, this can be done using cellular phones for listening to short podcasts by native speakers about such topics as culture, art, and literature.