The Effect of Pre-Listening Activities on the Listening Comprehension of the Foreign Persian Learners

Listening is one of the four main skills of language learning and yet it is a skill less investigated than other skills. In this research, an attempt was made to provide language teachers with some strategies for facilitating listening comprehension: as for the strategies, we can touch on the use of some activities before listening, whose effectiveness have been acknowledged in many studies. The present study investigated the effect of pre-listening activities on foreign learners of Persian language. The objective of the research was to evaluate the effectiveness of three pre-listening activities and order of their effectiveness— previewing questions, providing background knowledge about the topic, and vocabulary instruction. In this research, eight intermediate Persian learners who were studying in the Persian language teaching center for non-Persian speakers of Allamah Tabatabai University, participated. The age of the learners ranged from 20 to 25 and they were Russian and Turkish. This research was conducted in three sessions, that each dealt with one of the pre-listening activities. The learners were asked to answer the text-related questions after listening. Using statistical indicators including mean and standard deviation, the data of the three tests were compared, indicating that the difference between the mean scores of the language learners was significant. Besides, the result was obtained tha the order of the effectiveness of the three types of pre-listening activities on the Persian learners’ listening comprehension is “vocabulary instruction”, “providing background knowledge about the topic”, and “previewing questions”.
Extended Abstract:

1. Introduction
Listening is one of the four main skills of language learning, which is less studied than the other skills. Learning a second language is not possible without receiving comprehensible input in the form of writing or listening. Among the four skills of listening, reading, writing, and speaking, listening is the most fundamental. Listening is even more important than reading. Although they both deal with input, they are essentially different. In listening, it is not possible to stop and listen again, while in reading, it is possible to pause or re-read. Another reason for the importance of listening skills is that, in the early stages of education, when the learner does not have the ability to read, he or she may only strengthen their learning through listening skills.
Due to the high importance of listening skills in language teaching, this research tries to take a step towards developing listening skills and further facilitating language learning by examining activities that may improve the listening comprehension of language learners. One of these is the use of pre-listening activities. The purpose of this research is to investigate the effect of three pre-listening activities on listening comprehension, including previewing questions, providing background knowledge about the topic, and vocabulary instruction. Specifically, this research aims to determine which of these activities may help Persian learners more than the others in listening comprehension.
It is said that the importance of pre-listening activities is that they activate the learners' existing knowledge about the topic. Previewing questions before listening is a type of activity that may help improve understanding and also lead to more and easier comprehension. Regarding vocabulary instruction, it is said that from the perspective of language learners, segmenting words or identifying separate words in speech is one of the main difficulties in listening comprehension. Additionally, language learners who recognize less than 80% of the different words of a listening text, are more likely to have difficulty with listening comprehension. Listening involves both linguistic knowledge (e.g., phonology) and non-linguistic knowledge (e.g., experience or previous knowledge) that are necessary for the construction of meaning. Current views on listening comprehension emphasize the significance of prior knowledge or background knowledge in listening comprehension.
Based on the research background, the following hypothesis may be proposed:
 The pre-listening activity of providing background knowledge about the topic in contrast of previewing questions and vocabulary instruction has a greater effect on the listening performance of foreign Persian learners.
2. Review of Literature
Among the research conducted in the field of pre-listening activities is the research of Berne (1995), which examines the effect of such activities on Spanish listening performance. A comparison of the listening comprehension performance of second language learners of Spanish who completed three different pre-listening activities after one and two exposures to the listening passage shows that the scores for subjects completing the question preview activity were significantly higher than the scores for subjects completing the fillering activity and that additional exposure to the listening passage improves listening comprehension performance significantly, irrespective of pre-listening treatment. Chang and Reed (2006) also looked into the impact of pre-listening activities on listening performance. In their research, four activities were studied: previewing questions, providing background knowledge about the topic, providing vocabulary instruction, and repeating input.
3. Theoretical Framework
In the 1960s, a hypothesis was proposed in which language learning begins with comprehension and then leads to production. Speaking will emerge automatically after the learner understands the function of the target language. At first, the language learners' speech may not be perfect, but it will gradually become similar to the target language. The comprehension approach, which focuses on understanding language, shows the importance of listening comprehension ability. One of the ways to teach listening comprehension is to use pre-listening activities that may help listeners understand better. This research use comprehension approach to investigate about The Effect of Pre-Listening Activities on the Listening Comprehension of the Foreign Persian Learners.
4. Data Analysis Results
In this research, eight intermediate Persian learners who were studying in the Persian language teaching center for non-Persian speakers, at Allamah Tabataba'i University participated. The ages of the learners ranged from 20 to 25 and they were of Russian and Turkish nationalities. This research was conducted in three sessions, each dealing with one of the pre-listening activities. The learners were asked to answer text-related questions after listening, and the listening content was played for them two times. Using statistical indicators, including mean and standard deviation, the data of the three tests were compared, indicating that the difference between the mean scores of the language learners was significant. Moreover, the results showed that the effectiveness of each of the three activities on the Persian learners' listening comprehension was different, with the order of effectiveness of the three types of pre-listening activities on the Persian learners' listening comprehension being "vocabulary instruction", "providing background knowledge about the topic", and "previewing questions".