The effect of teaching culturally-oriented materials on the listening comprehension of Iranian EFL learners

The purpose of the present study was to examine the effect of cultural knowledge on the listening comprehension of Iranian EFL learners. 70 intermediate EFL learners (of Lahijan private English institute (Guilan province, Iran) out of 95, who were selected randomly, participated in this study. The placement test was conducted to choose the intermediate samples. The study utilized an experimental pre-test post-test design with 35 participants in the experimental group and 35 participants in the control group. The experimental group received some treatment in the form of role-playing, audio-motor unit model, and watching video clips that gave them good cultural knowledge of listening materials, while the control group received no such treatment. Before inserting treatment, both groups participated in a pre-test. The results of the pre-test indicated that the participants of the two groups were homogenous with respect to their listening comprehension ability. After one month treatment of experimental group, both groups participated in a post-test. The results of the post-test indicated that the subjects in the treatment group whose background knowledge was activated by cultural knowledge performed significantly better than they did in the pre-test. Simultaneously, there was not a significant difference between the performance of the control group in pre-and post-tests. The control group performed poorer than they did in the pre-test. It was concluded that topic familiarity with culturally-oriented language materials generally raised the Iranian EFL learners’ listening proficiency.

listening comprehension; background knowledge; cultural knowledge; culture; EFL learners