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”.