The Effects of Receptive and Productive Task-based Listening Activities on the Listening Ability of Iranian EFL Learners at Different Proficiency Levels

As a demanding language skill, listening is frequently underestimated by students and educators in the field of second language learning because effective listening skills are developed over time with lots of practice but listening practices are limited and the activities are either decontextualised or inappropriate for students of a particular proficiency level. in an attempt to incorporate more communicative listening activities appropriate for different proficiency levels, this study integrated task-based language teaching (tblt) approach to: 1) investigate the overall effect of task-based listening activities on iranian efl learners’ listening ability, and 2) identify the extent to which receptive and productive listening task types correspond with a particular language proficiency level. the participants were 90 iranian language learners in three intermediate, upper-intermediate, and advanced proficiency levels. different receptive and productive task types were practiced in all the classes. then, the learners were pre-tested and post-tested on a task-based test of listening comprehension. descriptive statistics and several paired and independent t-tests were run to analyse the collected data. the findings of the study showed that students at all proficiency levels outperformed in their posttests compared to their pretests. concerning the correspondence between the listening tasks and proficiency levels, students at all three levels of proficiency outperformed in their posttest compared to their pretest in both the receptive and productive listening tasks, except for the intermediate group whose improvement was not significant in the productive tasks. the study yielded some useful implications for language instructors, encouraging them to incorporate the tblt in their classes and assign more appropriate task types for different proficiency levels.