A Content-Based Approach to Teaching and Testing Listening Skills to Grade 5 EFL Learners

Abstract

English education has been officially incorporated into elementary-level education in Taiwan since 2001, with the key objective of reinforcing pupils’ oral communication in class. Although oral interaction involves a degree of listening input from interlocutors, listening has unfortunately remained a marginalized area in Taiwanese elementary education. Little is known about how to improve young learners’ listening comprehension and listening skills in Taiwanese contexts. The present study was carried out with 52 11-year-old elementary school pupils in Taiwan. An English course was designed to integrate pupils’ listening skills into a content-based course with a series of tourism-related topics. The results showed that the teaching of listening skills could be integrated into the content-based course and certain listening skills were greatly improved. Also, the study has implications for designing a topic-based course for teaching and testing listening skills, as well as for developing listening and speaking abilities in young EFL learners.