Vocabulary Tasks as a Pedagogical Tool to Improve Listening Scores- An Action Research Study at UTAS-Ibra

Listening has always been one of the most challenging skills for EFL students. Research shows that EFL learners often struggle to recognize even known vocabulary in its spoken form. Additionally, Arab EFL learners face unique problems due to phoneme-grapheme mismatch, lack of vowel representation in Arabic, and students’ limited exposure to spelling-intensive teaching. Learners at UTAS-Ibra aren’t immune to this near-universal impediment, and they scored poorly in listening exams across levels. However, there is an added disadvantage that sets them apart, i.e., most of the students at UTAS-Ibra come from the hinterlands of the Sharqia region and their exposure to English is even more restricted. To address this problem, the researchers included eight vocabulary tasks using VocabTest.com besides the regular in-text vocabulary activities and listening comprehension worksheets. The vocabulary activities consisted of six core activities and two supplementary game activities. Three of these core activities were spelling-intensive, and others were meaning-intensive. VocabTest.com, a free online platform, generates all activities once teachers input vocabulary details such as meaning, part of speech, synonyms, and a sentence. All these activities were conducted in a structured way on successive teaching days of the week. The researchers employed a quasi-experimental quantitative two-wave repeated measures research design and examined the listening scores from the midterm exam to the final exam in two experimental groups in Level 1 and Level 3. Statistical analysis showed significant improvement in both groups in Level 1 (d = 1.48 and 1.08; p < .001), confirmed by Wilcoxon signed-rank tests (r = 1.000 and 0.895). In Level 3, both the experimental groups showed improvement in their listening scores (d= 0.53; p < .01 and 1.14; p < .001), reaffirmed by Wilcoxon-signed rank tests (r= 0.600 and 0.918). The results suggest a positive association implying vocabulary tasks can be an effective pedagogical tool to enhance listening skills of the EFL study population. Implications for teachers, administrators, policymakers, and researchers are discussed.