Student Teachers’ Listening Fluency Interaction Patterns: The Use of Similar News Stories in Narrow Listening

Abstract

This article reports the use of similar news stories in narrow listening in an Extensive Listening course to promote student teachers’ listening fluency in an Indonesian initial teacher education context. This study was to investigate: (1) What is the patterns of interaction of Indonesian student teachers of English regarding their listening fluency when exposed to slow, moderately slow, and normal speech level texts?; and (2) What are the challenges and opportunities of promoting listening fluency through narrow listening using news stories in an Extensive Listening course? The aims of this article are to portray student teachers’ listening fluency interaction patterns through similar news stories in narrow listening and to investigate the challenges and opportunities of promoting listening fluency using narrow listening. This sequential mix-method study reported 40 student teachers’ engagement in extensive listening activities over 12 weeks, such as: (1) the choice of the news stories using online extensive listening material selection survey, (2) repeated listening tasks for fluency development at a lower to a normal speech rate level, and (3) linked-skills fluency development activities scaffolded by the teacher educators. The study found that similar news stories in narrow listening as extensive listening material helped student teachers familiarize similar structures and vocabulary of the spoken texts from similar topics/themes. The article portrays the inclusion of narrow listening in an Extensive Listening course can help the development of student teachers’ listening fluency in Indonesian initial Teacher Education context.