The Use of Videoconferencing and Unprescribed Conversation for Listening Comprehension in L2 Spanish

Background

Listening has been identified as perhaps the most difficult skill to acquire in L2 (see Proefschrift, 2003; Renukadevi, 2014; Seigel & Seigel, 2015; Vandergrift, 2004; Vandergrift & Goh, 2012). For learners, stress is often a factor in poor performance (Renukadevi, 2014), which may be due to gaps in L2; other issues stem from their (i.e., learner) inability to strategize when completing listening tasks, difficulty understanding foreign accents and lack of vocabulary and pragmatic knowledge (Flowerdew & Miller, 1996; Reunkadevi, 2014; Yagang, 1994). For instructors and researchers, finding new ways to facilitate learners’ struggles with listening comprehension activities through innovative instructional frameworks is challenging and time consuming, and often requires a great deal of intricacy and planning. To that end, previous research has suggested that the deficiency of studies in this area of inquiry is attributed to three specific factors: (1) the intangibility and seemingly unquantifiable nature of listening as an investigative variable; (2) the frequent need for expensive software programs required for research on auditory growth; and (3) the lack of control that researchers have over dialogue-based treatment exercises, as discussed in Osada (2004).