Estimating EFL Learners’ Lecture Comprehension Level through CEFR-Based Academic Lecture Tasks

Academic listening has been ignored for a long time in universities and academic contexts (Ulum, 2014), leading to undergraduate students’ problems in their academic listening activities including lecture comprehension. However, at the Iran University of Science and Technology (IUST) a course on academic listening is being offered to undergraduate students of Engineering containing numerous academic listening tasks. One of the objectives of the course is to improve students lecture comprehension; however, no information is available about students’ level on academic lecture listening tasks. Thus, the purpose of this study was to determine the students’ levels onlecture listening comprehension tasks based on CEFR. The participants of the study were Iranian undergraduate students of Engineering (N=94) at the Iran University of Science and Technology. Four lecture tasks at four levels (A2, B1, B2, & C1) chosen from Real Listening and Speaking (Craven, 2008) were the instruments in this research. The results showed that only 9.6% of the participants were placed at C1, while 28.7% of them were placed at ‘below A2’. The participants’ lecture comprehension level could be hierarchically ranked as ‘below A2’ (28.7%), A2 (27.7%), B1 (23.4%), B2 (10.6%) and C1 (9.6%). EGAP instructors at the IUST are recommended to consider the students’ level while teaching and assessing academic lectures.

کلیدواژه ها:

CEFR ، academic lecture ، academic listening ، listening tasks