The Investigation of Authentic vs. Pedagogical Tape Scripts on Listening Comprehension Ability of Tourism Students

The present study is an attempt to investigate the effects of authentic vs. pedagogical tape scripts on Iranian EFL learners listening comprehension ability. For this purpose an OPT (Oxford Placement Test) was administered to a total of 78 Iranian EFL learners. Then, 40 of them who were considered as intermediate learners were selected. The participants were randomly divided into two groups i.e. an experimental group and a control group. Both groups were pretested prior to the study. Then, the experimental group received the treatment in the form of listening to authentic or real English i.e. the real conversations by native speakers of English; while, the control group was exposed to pedagogical listening skills that were specially recorded for EFL learners of foreigners After ten sessions, both groups were post tested. Then the results of the posttests were subjects of statistical analysis (pairedsamples ttest and independentsamples ttest). The results indicated that the experimental group did better than the control group and there is a significant difference between the mean scores of the experimental group who were exposed to authentic tape scripts and the control group who received a normal practice of listening proficiency i.e. a placebo.