Evaluation of Different Types of Listening Tasks According to Task-Based Approach in Teaching Arabic to Non-Arabic Speakers

It is necessary to pay attention to processing mechanisms in language teaching and involve language learners in different processing models, so that learners can interact properly in authentic contexts. This requires an instructional approach that develops all processing levels. Despite the importance of this issue in teaching listening skills, no study was found to assess and evaluate different listening tasks in Arabic language teaching. Therefore, using a quasi-experimental approach, the present study intends to evaluate different listening tasks in the task-based approach and attempts to examine the comprehensiveness of this instructional approach in teaching different processing models. To this end, first, 15 undergraduate students of the University of Tehran were selected and a pre-test which contained questions with different processing models was administered. After assessing their listening skills, the language learners were trained for 16 sessions according to tasked-based approach using an educational package that was prepared for this purpose. At the end of the sessions, a post-test was given to the students. The obtained data were analyzed by SPSS software. The results of the t-test showed that language learners made significant progress in the post-test compared to the pre-test. ‌Friedman test results showed that post-test tasks were not significantly different from each other for language learners, and they successfully responded to all tasks with different processing models. Therefore, it can be concluded that processing is interactive in this approach because language learners were successful in performing all tasks, including both top-down and bottom-up tasks. Thus, in teaching Arabic to Persian speakers, the task-based teaching approach can be used as a comprehensive and effective teaching approach that prepares learners for different types of processing mechanisms in different contexts.