English Listening Skills Research Paper

With the invention of smart phones, a new market of mini-software called applications has appeared and is developing at an incredible pace. Application can be easily found online. The Google Play and iTunes app store have over 67500 applications and 75000 applications available to customers, respectively. Among these incredible applications are a large number of applications created to serve students of foreign languages. Among a variety of smart phone applications are a large number of authentic materials which are mostly available and without payment. In other words, students are free to download the applications serving English listening skills from smart phones, which grant them a huge opportunity to be exposed to the target language, and

Using smart phones in English listening skills, students can utilize ‘podcasting,’ whose most popular form is MP3, as an authentic and meaningful means of learning. MP3, as defined in Wikipedia, “is a popular digital audio encoding and lossy compression format. It was designed to greatly reduce the amount of data (10:1 compression is common) required to represent audio, yet still sound like a faithful reproduction of the original uncompressed audio to most listeners. In popular usage, MP3 also refers to files of sound or music recordings stored in the MP3 format on computers,” and this type of listening skills learning assistant has become popular

Audio book, as defined in Wikipedia, is a recording of a text being read. Audio books were first introduced in 1931 within the scope of "Books for the Adult Blind Project." However, the use of audio books has gone far beyond its original purpose. Nowadays, thanks to the expansion of smart phones, the audio books have become widely known. According to a research conducted by the American Association of publishers, the number of audio books sold increased 43.3% in 2016, compared to 2014, and approximately 3.88 million audio books were downloaded in 2015. Unfortunately, little research has been conducted about the impacts of audio books on the listening skills of students learning foreign languages. Some previous experimental studies found that listening to audio books improves both reading comprehension and listening skills (Jakobs (2006), Turker, 2010)). According to Wolfson (2008), a significant feature of audio books is that they are read aloud by professional narrators. Therefore, audio books can be described as an effective tool for students to imitate the narrators' voices as well as intonation, from which they can gradually enhance their listening and speaking skills. Lastly, audio books can be listened to via computers, MP3 players, CDs, cassettes, especially smart phones, and most important, students can use the existing books to follow up the narrator. Hence, they would not be afraid of