Issues and Strategies in Teaching Listening and Speaking Skills within the Framework of Foreign Language Pedagogy
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Abstract
Background: Listening and speaking are mutually constitutive in communicative competence, yet classroom practice often treats them as discrete skills. Recent studies (2020–2025) underscore the value of dialogic tasks, multimodal input, metacognitive regulation, and AI-supported personalization for enhancing perceptual processing, interactional competence, and fluency within ecologically valid learning environments.
Research gap: Empirical work rarely integrates cognitive models of speech perception with interactional pragmatics and task-based pedagogy in a single design. Moreover, designs that coordinate adaptive input (e.g., calibrated speech rate, lexical density) with real-time conversational feedback remain under-specified, and evidence on transfer across genres and modalities is limited.
Aim: To examine persistent issues in teaching listening and speaking and to evaluate strategy-rich, technology-enhanced interventions that align cognitive processing with communicative, task-based principles.
Methodology: A mixed-methods, quasi-experimental study followed 168 university EFL learners over 12 weeks in four sections: CLT baseline; CLT+metacognitive prompting; CLT+AI-adaptive input and interactive chat; and a combined condition. Data included standardized listening and speaking assessments (rater-moderated CEFR scales), clickstream traces (pauses, caption use), dialogic analytics (turn length, repair moves), and stimulated-recall interviews. Multilevel modeling estimated learning gains; thematic analysis examined strategy deployment.
Findings: The combined condition yielded the largest improvements in listening (g≈0.58) and speaking (g≈0.52). AI adaptivity reduced extraneous load and increased lexical coverage; metacognitive cycles (plan–monitor–evaluate) supported transfer of segmentation, inferencing, and interactional repair strategies. Learners demonstrated greater autonomy by calibrating caption density, pausing, and rehearsal timing; conversational feedback enhanced turn-taking fluidity and reduced dysfluency clusters.
Implications: Integrate adaptive difficulty, graduated captions, strategic pausing, and interactive feedback within task-based cycles, coupling explicit metacognitive scaffolds with opportunities for authentic interaction and reflective debrief.
Original contribution: The study articulates a unified, CLT-compatible framework that operationalizes cognitive and interactional strategy instruction with AI-mediated adaptivity, offering actionable design principles for scalable, genre-transferrable gains in L2 listening and speaking.