ESL Cyber Listening Lab and listening skills

Abstract

In the current study, the aim was to investigate the impact of the ESL Cyber Listening Lab platform on listening skills. It was a descriptive and non-experimental study using a sample of 73 students, of whom 24 were men and 49 were women. Data was collected through a survey with 19 Likert-scale items and three open-ended questions. There was a validation of the reliability of the survey by experts as well as by Cronbach’s alpha (0,838). As a result of this study, three research questions were attempted to be answered: types of activities from the platform,strategies, and subskills students use in the EFL classroom. Based on the results, it was found that on the ESL Cyber Listening Lab platform, learners would like to engage in listening to vocabulary audios, audios for academic purposes, life stories, and controversial issues to expand their vocabulary and improve their listening comprehension. In addition, the ESL Cyber Listening Lab platform shares similarities with those on other platforms such as ELLLO, BBC Learning English, and ESL Videos. However, students stated that a preference for using the Duolingo platform to enhance their listening skills. Additionally, a variety of strategies have been identified that students employ to improve their listening skills, including note-taking, predicting content, and active repetition to optimize their listening skills. Findings revealed that most students use listening for the gist, listening for specific information, and listening to infer the attitude of the speakers that are employed collectively to enhance listening comprehension.