Exploring EFL Learners’ Needs for Scaffolding Strategies in an Academic Listening Course

This study aimed at (a) exploring the needs for scaffolding strategies of undergraduate students of Engineering in the academic listening course offered at the Iran University of Science and Technology (IUST) and (b) identifying the relationship between learners’ needs of scaffolding and their academic IELTS listening scores. The participants of this study were 140 Iranian undergraduate students of Engineering at the IUST. An academic IELTS Listening Test and a questionnaire on scaffolding strategies of listening were the instruments of this study. The results showed that the learners needed their instructors to ‘wait for them to answer the questions’ (87.8%); ‘simplify the tasks and make them more achievable for the students’ (80.7%), and ‘repeat whole or part of a task for the them if needed’ (80%), respectively; on the other hand, ‘identifying the wrong answer and discussing about it’ (11.5%), ‘using educational aids (pictures, films, and files)’ (11.5%), and ‘extending the task to similar ideas’ (10.7%) were the scaffolding strategies which were the least frequent ones among learners’ responses. The results of multinominal logistic regression also showed that ‘providing clues and directions to help students find the correct answers’ and ‘correcting tasks or answers whenever needed’ were the two strategies, which were statistically significant in the lower level students’ needs for scaffolding strategies of listening.