“Deya understand?”: a phonological study of ESL Arab learners’ listening comprehension of English weak forms

<p dir="ltr">Listening comprehension of English is the most challenging language skill that English as a Second Language (ESL) Arab learners, especially those in the beginning and emerging phases of English development, encounter in Australian high schools. This is partially due to the presence of weak forms (WFs) in native spoken English. Perception and production are, in many cases, distanced from each other. Perception (listening), unlike production (speaking), does not receive its due attention from ESL teachers in Australia. This research is an experimental study that aims to investigate the relative effects of processing instruction (PI) and traditional instruction (TI) about English WFs on Arab ESL learners’ English listening comprehension. It explores the relationship between competence in English rhythm and listening comprehension. The target participants were Syrian Arab ESL emerging students aged 12-18 in Newcastle high schools. The PI treatment consisted of explicit information on WFs and an effective processing strategy, followed by structured input (SI) activities. The TI included explicit information on WFs without an effective processing strategy, followed by structured output-based drills. </p><p dir="ltr">A non-interventional experiment was conducted in advance to assess the participants’ awareness of some English prosodic features and WFs, and to explore the rhythmic and prosodic features of their L1 (Arabic) as compared to L2 (English). In the interventional experiment, the participants’ ability to understand native spoken English before and after the instructional treatments (i.e., PI or TI) was assessed with a pre-test and a post-test. Both tests included three tasks: sentence repetition (SR), a sentence listening cloze (SLC) and a passage listening cloze (PLC). Before intervention, participants were divided into three groups. Group A received PI on the WFs, while Group B received TI on the same forms. A control group (Group C) was included as a baseline and received no treatment. The study hypothesises that the Arab ESL learners’ exposure to either PI or TI on WFs in English enhances their ability to understand native spoken English. It concludes that for both SLC and PLC tasks, the TI approach was more effective than PI, especially for the participants with low to intermediate English listening comprehension ability. However, PI yielded a slight improvement in the SLC and PLC among the participants with more advanced listening comprehension capability. Although learners in the three groups had higher scores in the pre-test SR task than in the SLC and PLC tasks, PI group learners achieved higher post-test scores in this task than the TI and control groups, which suggests higher efficacy of PI on the learning outcomes for such task.</p>