Developing listening comprehension ability by helping college students to explore listening strategies to use English as a global lingua franca

The development of English listening comprehension is a vital part to increasing one's ability in using English as a global franca. This study intends to improve the English proficiency of college students, exploring how Japanese college students could improve their English listening ability by finding and exploiting their 'best-fit' strategies. In this project, we have 53 participants in English-medium seminar courses that we are teaching in three separate courses at a Japanese women's college. Participants were divided into three groups: Control Group-1 (n=20), in which students are taught by a native English teacher, Control Group-2, in which students are encouraged to use CALL materials (n=13) and Treatment Group, in which students are encouraged to find and use their best-fit listening strategies (Strategy Group: n=20). This project is divided into three phases. During the spring semester, all the participants were encouraged to review their present listening strategy use by using LCS-J (Listening Comprehension Strategy Questionnaire, Japanese version; Wakamoto & Rose, 2018) and to check their vocabulary size by using VLT (Vocabulary Levels Test, Schmitt, Schmitt, & Clapham, 2001). In the second phase, four weeks during summer vacation, all participants were prompted to continue listening practice. The Strategy Group was asked to make their 'best-fit' listening comprehension strategies with self-regulation strategies, especially paying attention to how they could overcome procrastination and satiation. After the eight-week project of the second phase, the Strategy Group gave poster presentations about their 'best-fit' listening comprehension strategies and offered feedback to each other. During the third phase, eight weeks, all participants will be encouraged to continue to improve their listening comprehension ability, which will be evaluated by using the TOEIC, LCS-J, and VLT. In this presentation, we will discuss the strategies students chose and the evaluation of its effectiveness.