Optimizing pre-listening activities with AI-assisted priming for L2 listening comprehension

As second language (L2) listening presents significant real-time processing challenges for less competent L2 learners, pre-listening activities provide them with the much-needed mental scaffolding. Recent research has suggested that augmenting top-down predictive processing could help L2 learners overcome online processing disadvantages. To this end, we presented students with AI-generated priming materials whose content paralleled that of the target listening passages. We compared the effectiveness of AI-assisted priming through different sensory modalities versus conventional vocabulary pre-teaching in facilitating online processing during main listening tasks. In a within-subjects quasi-experimental design, 35 Vietnamese intermediate EFL learners participated in four pre-listening conditions: lexical support (LS; reading a word list with definitions and pronunciations), visual priming (VP; reading a content-paralleled article), auditory priming (AP; listening to a content-paralleled monologue), and audiovisual priming (AVP; listening to a content-paralleled podcast with subtitles). Each experimental condition culminated in an IELTS Listening Sect. 2 task (multiple-choice and matching questions). Repeated measures ANOVA revealed that VP, AP, and AVP yielded significantly higher comprehension scores in the IELTS listening tasks than LS, although no significant differences were found among the three priming-based pre-listening activities. These findings highlight the potential of AI-assisted priming to boost predictive processing in L2 learners who struggle to keep up with continuous foreign speech streams. Considering its simplicity and practicality, this approach could be easily implemented in the classroom as well as on digital learning platforms.