Digital Tool for Listening Comprehension

Main idea

Outline

Since first year students are often used to attending classes consisting of maximum 30 pupils, the transition to higher education involves getting used to attending classes in bigger groups. Part of that includes getting used to the new academic language (e.g., hypothesis).

Main goal

Offering students tips, tricks, tools and a training to better follow lectures.

Detailed description

The Digital Tool for Listening Comprehension consists out of six lessons which prepare students for attending lectures. Each of these lessons focusses on listening comprehension and metacognition. Two lessons specifically address vocabulary, and another two lessons relate to taking notes.

Each lesson starts with a recording of the introduction of a lecture. After this introduction they see a sample of the same lecture three times. After the each viewing, they get a couple of questions about the fragment (e.g., What do you think the rest of the lecture will be about?, Which strategy did you use to find out the meaning of this term?…) followed by some answers of their peers.

Students can independently use the tool and choose in which order to take the lessons.

(No) part of the curriculum

The digital tool is not part of the curriculum.

Made by

This tool was developed by a staff member of Artevelde University of Applied Sciences (AUAS) in collaboration with a staff member from Antwerp University.

Timing

Each lesson takes about half an hour, making the entire online tool about three hours long to complete. It’s recommended to take one lesson per week. The tool itself is available 24/7.

Goals

• Helping students develop their listening comprehension skills
• Helping students understand academic language
• Teaching students how to take notes efficiently
• Encouraging students to reflect on how they attend lectures

Students involvement

Students are involved in the delivery of this initiative. All lessons include videos in which students share their answers to the questions in the digital tool.

Inspiration and evidence

• The concept of Basic and Extended Language Cognition by Hulstijn
• The work by Vandergrift (2004) about metacognition and listening in the context of second language education
• The principles of observational learning

Success criteria

• There’s attention for the ways in which lectures are new to first-year students.
• It looks at lectures as more than just taking notes.
• It’s available 24/7.
• There’s a clear structure.
• It encourages the student to reflect.
• It’s evidence-informed.
• The moment the tool is fully developed, it requires minimal attention.

Points of attention

• The fragments used in the lessons aren’t necessarily linked to the students’ study programme. If this was the case, students might be more motivated.
• Running through and completing the tool independently requires a lot of motivation of students.
• The training is not available on an institutional platform.

Effectiveness

Starting from students who had finished more than 4 lessons we could see a significant difference in the scores of metacognition after 8 weeks.

Do you feel you can effectively provide the support that students require?

Would you recommend this to other institutions?

agree

Evaluation

The effectiveness of the online tool was evaluated with a group of students in its development.

Results

The results looked at participation and aimed to track effectiveness.

Only about half of the pilot group finished all six trainings. The success of a digital tool depends greatly on students’ self-management. Sadly, some students aren’t good at this and require some more direction.

Communication

• The digital tool is mentioned on the institutional online platform on a page for students seeking help with attending lectures.
• It’s mentioned during an entry course on attending lectures.

Timing

Each lesson takes half an hour maximum, making the entire online tool about three hours long to complete. It’s recommended to take one lesson per week. The tool itself is available 24/7.

Resources

• The digital tool is on a free platform (edpuzzle).
• You need qualitative recordings of lectures (with good audio).
• The recording of videos with students to integrate in the tool time to make (6x1h) as well as the editing.

Transferability

We think it is easily transferable to other contexts or groups.

We expect the principles of listening comprehension to be universal. There might be some cultural differences on what students are expected to do in lectures.

Universal Design

The design of this tool was not based on the principles of Universal Design, but there were efforts to make it inclusive for all students:

• The students in the videos are from diverse ethnic cultural and educational backgrounds so that anyone using the digital tool can find someone similar to them in one way or another.
• The tool is self-explanatory and easy to use.