A Study on Using Podcast to Facilitate English Listening Comprehension

摘要

While acquiring English as a foreign language, a consideration on providing a genuine English learning environment to learners can arouse a more active and direct immersion of the language learning. By the feature of authenticity, English listening comprehension has been seen as an important prerequisite to other language skills in English learning. Moreover, a different receiving listening process of bottom-up or top-down way might influence how learners comprehend the information. Besides, an appearance of pod cast is identified as a beneficial facilitation to foreign language learning, and through its usage might enrich the language learning efficiency. To this end, this study addresses these notions to concern how the pod cast can be an aid to advance alternative means of English listening comprehension to EFL learners. The findings discuss how and the distinction of the two different listening comprehended processing within pod cast affect learning outcome, the role of prior knowledge, background information, and pod cast among the learning procedure. The expected results tend to show the alternative listening comprehended processing would benefit EFL learners who engage in different prior knowledge and background of English learning experience. A concern of different English level learners might favor either distinct or alternate means of listening processing.