Estimating engineering students' listening ability through level-specific CEFR-based descriptors and general and academic listening tasks

The purpose of this study was to determine a listening level based on Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR) for undergraduate students of engineering and also to compare the self-reporting of their listening comprehension on the DIALANG and the CEFR listening self-assessment descriptors with their level on the academic and general listening tasks. The participants of this study were 200 Iranian male and female learners (male=148, female=52) at the BS level at the Iran University of Science and Technology. The instruments of this research were the CEFR and the DIALANG listening self-assessment grids and eight listening comprehension tasks at four levels (i.e., A2, B1, B2, & C1) and in two different genres (academic and general). The results revealed that female learners performed better on the general and academic listening tasks than male learners did. The results also indicated that the learners' self-assessment did not correspond closely with their performance on the listening tasks as both groups rated their listening comprehension higher on the CEFR and DIALANG grids. The number of matches on the DIALANG grid was also greater than that of the CEFR, and the matches on the academic tasks were greater than those of the general tasks.