International Journal of Languages' Education and Teaching

Abstract

Listening is defined as understanding, interpreting, evaluating, organizing, fixing ideas put forward in communication between listener and speaker, and identifying valuable ones to be stored in memory (Taşer, 2002: cited in İşcan and Aydın, 2014). At the initial learning stages, language skills to which learners are exposed are perceptive skills, namely reading and listening to have vital importance for helping them recognize vocabulary and perceive pronunciation correctly. After detecting vocabulary, learners are expected to understand and convey messages in their target language. This is merely realized by foreign language learners who improve their listening skills in target language; hence, they express their ideas more clearly, accelerate their language skills, and maintain mutual conversation and monologues dramatically underlined in Common European Framework for References (CEFR). Even though there have been studies on Turkish teaching textbooks, study based on listening skills are not encountered in the field. Therefore, the aim of this study is to investigate to what extent the listening activities in theTurkish course books cover the scales of CEFR, make a comparative study among the books and provide suggestions. At the end of the study, it is found that the guidance (headings/directions/guidelines) in instruction parts and the activities in the listening parts lack to embolden learners and motivate them to communicate before, during, and after listening activities.