The ability to listen efficiently plays a key role in oral communication for ESL/EFL students. Scholars in the field have suggested many strategies and methods to improve listening comprehension. One of these methods is concept mapping. However, whether the students actually realize that concept mapping may improve their listening comprehension has not been explored. Therefore, the present study was designed to investigate the effect of applying concept mapping techniques on EFL learners' attitudes towards using this technique in listening comprehension. To this end, 146 EFL students at the elementary level of language proficiency were selected, and they were randomly assigned to experimental and control groups. In the course of eight sessions, the experimental group went under an intervention of concept mapping, during which concept maps were introduced, and the listening paper of the KET was used as practice material. Descriptive statistics and a paired sample t-test that was utilized to analyze the data established that the two groups were significantly different in their listening comprehension ability. In order to assess the participants' attitudes, before and after the treatment, the researchers administered a self-assessment questionnaire to the participants in the experimental group. The results indicated that the participants felt that using concept mapping strategies significantly improved their listening comprehension. The fact that the participants made this realization indicates that using concept mapping strategies raised the learners' awareness regarding their listening, and may lead to learner autonomy.
It is believed that peer assessment equips learners with a skill set withheld from them by teacher assessments that enhances language learning. However, the benefits of peer assessment are limited to how well learners can conduct peer assessment tasks. Therefore, improving the efficacy of peer assessment is essential. One way to increase the consistency of peer assessment is to increase learner attention during the assessment task. The Cognition Hypothesis states that L2 learners engaged in complex tasks pay attention to more complex linguistic structures; as a result, learning increases (Robinson, 2001a(Robinson, , 2001b(Robinson, , 2005. The purpose of this study was to investigate whether complex tasks, as outlined by the Cognition Hypothesis, improve the accuracy of peer assessment. Thirty female EFL learners conducted three speaking tasks. Each task had a different level of complexity, and participants were assessed by their peers using a rating scale. The results indicated that the absolute mean deviations for the items on the rating scale decreased as task complexity increased. In other words, the findings showed that as task complexity increased, there was more agreement among the assessors. This indicatedthat peer assessment wasmore accurate and consistent for more complex tasks.
Screen recording technology provides us with means of analyzing the writing process. However, the possible advantages of using retrospective protocols with this new technology have not been explored. This paper investigated how stimulated recall induced peer-peer and instructor-student interactions during the replay of the participants' writing process using screen recording software affected the number of surface and non-surface changes made either during (noticing) or after (revision) the stimulated recall session (SRS). Twenty skilled users of English wrote different argumentative essays and recorded the writing process. Next, they participated in SRSs while watching the replay of their writing process, three times with a peer (twice as practice) and once with an instructor. Modifications were made during and after the SRSs. The results indicate that the number of modifications made in the instructor-student SRSs were greater than in peer-peer SRSs. However, further analysis revealed that the participants made more non-surface changes in instructor-student SRSs than in peer-peer SRSs. Intriguingly, no significant difference was found in the number of surface changes between the two types of SRSs. Implications of the finding are further explored.
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