Background and Aim: In today’s world of gadgets, the use of Portable Music Players (PMP) in young people has grown faster than our ability to assess their potential health consequences. The aim of the present study is to investigate the damaging effects caused by improper use of portable music players on hearing.Materials and Methods: Primary hearing damage caused by these devices were investigated by Distortion Product Otoacoustic Emission, whereby amplitude of DPOAE (intensity level l1=65dBHL) was compared among 21 young adults who had used their devices at least for a year for>1 h/day, at>50% of the maximum volume setting and 21 subjects as control group. The data of the present case-control study was analyzed using Independent t-test and Mann-Whitney statistica measures.Results: Mean DPOAE amplitude between the two groups showed a decrease in the amplitude f2=1 & 2 kHz in the right ear and f2=3 kHz in the left ear in the user group (p=0.011). Comparison of the two sexes showed a decrease in DPOAE amplitude greater in men than in women (p=0.042).Conclusion: The results showed a decrease in DPOAE amplitude in users compared with that in the controls. The changes in hearing sensitivity measured by DPOAE indicate the potential harmful effects of LISTENING to loud music on hearing and cochlea function.

Background and Aim: Hearing process for daily activities of normal people is possible without special effort, and yet, in peoples suffering from hearing loss-with or without hearing aids – it mandates effort. The stress and fatigue secondary to this effort and concentration to percieve the speech have negative effects on these individuals’ performance. This challenge affects a big population in the community. This is more prominent in difficult hearing situations and noisy environments. Therefore, it seems to be important to assess LISTENING effort, its physiopathology, and the contributing factors, and when possible, provide ways to manage it and decrease its negative effects on these individuals’ quality of life. Materials and Methods: To collect data for the current study, we performed a search of the relevant articles using several keywords, including: LISTENING effort, LISTENING fatigue, hearing loss, and hearing aid, in ScienceDirect, GoogleScholar, Scopus, and PubMed databases, published between 1975 and 2018. Conclusion: According to the results, the LISTENING effort is not well studied yet. But it could affect other cognitive activities and lead to fatigue and increase stressing and consequently negatively impact the quality of life. Therefore, conducting more studies in this domain and considering its importance in future studies is necessary.

This study investigated the interrelationship among EFL learners' goal orientations, willingness to communicate (WTC), LISTENING anxiety, and LISTENING comprehension. Two-hundred participants, selected through convenience sampling procedure from private language institutes, completed the following questionnaires: Goal Orientation Questionnaire section of the Motivated Strategies for Learning Questionnaire (Pintrich et al., 1991), WTC Questionnaire (Cao & Philip, 2006), and Foreign Language LISTENING Anxiety Scale (Kim, 2000). The LISTENING section of the IELTS exam was also utilized for measuring the participants’ LISTENING comprehension ability. First, a hypothesized model was tested through the AMOS program. The results revealed that all the variables in the study were positively correlated with L2 LISTENING comprehension except for L2 LISTENING anxiety and performance goal orientation, which were negatively correlated with L2 LISTENING comprehension. Moreover, it was found that mastery goal orientation was the strongest predictor of the dependent variable. Then, the revised model for the interrelationship among the variables was presented. The results showed that both psychological and cognitive variables could have crucial roles in EFL learners’ success in learning LISTENING comprehension ability. The implications of the study are discussed in the text.

1. Introduction: LISTENING is one of the four main skills of language learning, which is less studied than the other skills. Learning a second language is not possible without receiving comprehensible input in the form of writing or LISTENING. Among the four skills of LISTENING, reading, writing, and speaking, LISTENING is the most fundamental. LISTENING is even more important than reading. Although they both deal with input, they are essentially different. In LISTENING, it is not possible to stop and listen again, while in reading, it is possible to pause or re-read. Another reason for the importance of LISTENING skills is that, in the early stages of education, when the learner does not have the ability to read, he or she may only strengthen their learning through LISTENING skills. Due to the high importance of LISTENING skills in language teaching, this research tries to take a step towards developing LISTENING skills and further facilitating language learning by examining activities that may improve the LISTENING comprehension of language learners. One of these is the use of pre-LISTENING activities. The purpose of this research is to investigate the effect of three preLISTENING activities on LISTENING comprehension, including previewing questions, providing background knowledge about the topic, and vocabulary instruction. Specifically, this research aims to determine which of these activities may help Persian learners more than the others in LISTENING comprehension. It is said that the importance of pre-LISTENING activities is that they activate the learners' existing knowledge about the topic. Previewing questions before LISTENING is a type of activity that may help improve understanding and also lead to more and easier comprehension. Regarding vocabulary instruction, it is said that from the perspective of language learners, segmenting words or identifying separate words in speech is one of the main difficulties in LISTENING comprehension. Additionally, language learners who recognize less than 80% of the different words of a LISTENING text, are more likely to have difficulty with LISTENING comprehension. LISTENING involves both linguistic knowledge (e. g., phonology) and non-linguistic knowledge (e. g., experience or previous knowledge) that are necessary for the construction of meaning. Current views on LISTENING comprehension emphasize the significance of prior knowledge or background knowledge in LISTENING comprehension. Based on the research background, the following hypothesis may be proposed: The pre-LISTENING activity of providing background knowledge about the topic in contrast of previewing questions and vocabulary instruction has a greater effect on the LISTENING performance of foreign Persian learners. 2. Review of Literature: Among the research conducted in the field of pre-LISTENING activities is the research of Berne (1995), which examines the effect of such activities on Spanish LISTENING performance. A comparison of the LISTENING comprehension performance of second language learners of Spanish who completed three different pre-LISTENING activities after one and two exposures to the LISTENING passage shows that the scores for subjects completing the question preview activity were significantly higher than the scores for subjects completing the fillering activity and that additional exposure to the LISTENING passage improves LISTENING comprehension performance significantly, irrespective of pre-LISTENING treatment. Chang and Reed (2006) also looked into the impact of pre-LISTENING activities on LISTENING performance. In their research, four activities were studied: previewing questions, providing background knowledge about the topic, providing vocabulary instruction, and repeating input. 3. Theoretical Framework: In the 1960s, a hypothesis was proposed in which language learning begins with comprehension and then leads to production. Speaking will emerge automatically after the learner understands the function of the target language. At first, the language learners' speech may not be perfect, but it will gradually become similar to the target language. The comprehension approach, which focuses on understanding language, shows the importance of LISTENING comprehension ability. One of the ways to teach LISTENING comprehension is to use pre-LISTENING activities that may help listeners understand better. This research use comprehension approach to investigate about The Effect of Pre-LISTENING Activities on the LISTENING Comprehension of the Foreign Persian Learners. 4. Data Analysis Results: In this research, eight intermediate Persian learners who were studying in the Persian language teaching center for non-Persian speakers, at Allamah Tabataba'i University participated. The ages of the learners ranged from 20 to 25 and they were of Russian and Turkish nationalities. This research was conducted in three sessions, each dealing with one of the pre-LISTENING activities. The learners were asked to answer text-related questions after LISTENING, and the LISTENING content was played for them two times. Using statistical indicators, including mean and standard deviation, the data of the three tests were compared, indicating that the difference between the mean scores of the language learners was significant. Moreover, the results showed that the effectiveness of each of the three activities on the Persian learners' LISTENING comprehension was different, with the order of effectiveness of the three types of pre-LISTENING activities on the Persian learners' LISTENING comprehension being "vocabulary instruction", "providing background knowledge about the topic", and "previewing questions".

As LISTENING is assumed as a passive skill or as it is difficult to study and conduct researches on this skill, the number of studies based on this skill are less than the studies done on the other skills. The primary purpose of this study was to find any possible differences between high and low proficient listeners and high and low motivated learners' metacognitive awareness of LISTENING strategies. The secondary purpose was to find the relationship between LISTENING proficiency and motivation of the participants. The findings of this study indicated that high and low proficient listeners were significantly different in using the LISTENING strategies, i.e., in 18 strategies out of a total of 21 strategies (high proficient listeners were significantly higher than low proficient ones in using 13 strategies, while low proficient listeners were significantly higher than high proficient listeners in using 5 (bad or negative) strategies). However high and low motivated learners did not show such a significant difference (high motivated learners were only significantly higher than low motivated ones in using 2 strategies). Finally, this study demonstrated that LISTENING proficiency and motivation had a positive relation with each other, though not a strong one.

The purpose of this study was to determine a LISTENING level based on Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR) for undergraduate students of engineering and also to compare the self-reporting of their LISTENING comprehension on the DIALANG and the CEFR LISTENING self-assessment descriptors with their level on the academic and general LISTENING tasks. The participants of this study were 200 Iranian male and female learners (male=148, female=52) at the BS level at the Iran University of Science and Technology. The instruments of this research were the CEFR and the DIALANG LISTENING self-assessment grids and eight LISTENING comprehension tasks at four levels (i. e., A2, B1, B2, & C1) and in two different genres (academic and general). The results revealed that female learners performed better on the general and academic LISTENING tasks than male learners did. The results also indicated that the learners' self-assessment did not correspond closely with their performance on the LISTENING tasks as both groups rated their LISTENING comprehension higher on the CEFR and DIALANG grids. The number of matches on the DIALANG grid was also greater than that of the CEFR, and the matches on the academic tasks were greater than those of the general tasks.

This study aimed to investigate the relationship between LISTENING assessment task types, time on task, and the use of LISTENING strategy by Iranian EFL learners. For this purpose, a group of 44 Iranian EFL students (Males and Females, 14 to 25 years old) selected through convenience sampling from an English language institute in Sanandaj participated in this study. Then, they were randomly assigned into four experimental groups. In one group, note-taking was considered the LISTENING assessment task, while in the second group oral reproduction was specified as the assessment task for assessing LISTENING comprehension. After that, each group was further subdivided randomly into a shorter time-on-task group (20 minutes) and a longer time-on-task group (40 minutes). Next, all groups completed Vandergrift, Goh, Mareschal, and Tafaghodtari’s (2006) Meta-cognitive Awareness LISTENING Strategy Questionnaire. A two-way ANOVA was run to examine the effects of both LISTENING assessment task type and time on task on LISTENING strategy use among the four groups. The results revealed that the students in the oral reproduction task with high time on task group significantly showed higher preferences for choosing Planning-Evaluation, Mental Translation, and Problem-Solving strategies and those in the note-taking with low time on task group preferred the Directed-Attention strategy, while those in the note-taking with high time on task group preferred Person-Knowledge strategy.