This study was an attempt to develop and experiment with a novel test of overall listening comprehension. The new procedure, that tends to be concerned with the top-down view of listening, was termed Dicto-Phrase, standing for dictation-paraphrase. It involves the examinees in a gist-retrieval activity, requiring them to focus on the propositions of language. The intent of the study was to find whether Dicto-Phrase was an efficient, reliable, and valid test of listening comprehension (LC). The 74 participants took three LC tests, namely, the listening section of the TOEFL, which served as the outside criterion, a test of partial dictation, and a Dicto-Phrase. The new Procedure showed acceptable reliability and low measurement error. Moreover, there was a rather high correlation between Dicto-Phrase and the listening section of the TOEFL, providing concurrent validity evidence for the former. Finally, the ANOVA provided evidence for the 'group validity' of the new test method.

Many studies in language learning have indicated that listening comprehension plays an important role in the learning process. In spite of its importance, listening has been ignored in second language learning, research, and teaching. The purpose of the present article is to define the terms listening and listening comprehension, review the components of listening, explain teachers’ role in listening comprehension, and present the general principles of listening comprehension. The literature review demonstrated that learners’ listening comprehension skill can be improved by teachers’ assistance and the use of appropriate learning materials and activities.

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".

The present study examined the effect of multimedia glosses on foreign language listening comprehension. To this end, 94 male students studying at Rasa English Institute in Tehran were selected for the treatment. The participants consisted of three groups, and each group was randomly assigned to one of the following treatment conditions: textual, pictorial, and textual-pictorial glossing. They were given a vocabulary pre-test before the treatment. The purpose of this test was to exclude the words which were already familiar to the participants from the posttests. Meanwhile, a listening comprehension post-test was administered at the end of the treatment period. To investigate the effect of multimedia glosses on listening comprehension, the data obtained from the listening comprehension post-test were analyzed using one-way ANOVA. The result showed that textual-pictorial glosses had a significant effect on listening comprehension. The findings of this study may have implications for language learners, teachers, researchers, and materials developers.

1. INTRODUCTION Different linguists have proposed different definitions for tense. This study investigates processing of sentences containing different tenses of Persian by the cross-modal lexical decision method. This psycholinguistic method has been used classically by Shapiro and Levine (1990) to estimate the cognitive load across the mind. The main question of this inquiry is the psycholinguistic reality of tense complexity hierarchy arranged from absolute to relative. The theoretical framework is mainly based on episodic processing in which mental representations of linguistic items are not as abstract as it seems, but it is subject to the sensory input by which the representation is formed. Also, the classification of Comrie (1985) on tenses has been applied here. He divided tenses into two broad categories of past/non-past. Absolute and relative types of the Persian tense have been elaborated and analyzed in detail. 2. MATERIALS AND METHODS The method used in this research is the cross modal lexical decision method, which will be detailed due to its importance. Theoretical framework applied here is that of Comrie (1985) in linguistics and Shapiro (1990) in psycholinguistics. Independent variable is the type of tense used in the verb form and the dependent variable is subjects' reaction times. 25 students of universities aged 18-30 participated in this study. The results of two experiments show that the psychological reality of the complexity of representation of grammatical tenses according to Persian data is confirmed and there is a significant difference between the processing time of sentences containing different types of grammatical tenses. 3. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION It was found out that Persian has two absolute tenses: Past and present; as well as four relative tenses: the perfective, the pluperfect, the subjunctive, and the relative past. The main question of the present study is that of the psycholinguistic reality of Tense in Persian. Cross modal lexical decision has been used here to examine tense during sentence processing. The results of the first experiment showed that sentences containing factual scientific present tense verbs, future tense verbs, and performatives are processed sooner than the other tenses. The justification and explanation of this can be attributed to the fact that scientific facts have been recorded in the life experience of human beings and have a high frequency. The results of the second experiment also showed that converting simple sentences to complex ones will omit the meaningful differences in the participantsˈ reaction times. The findings can be used in curriculum design for non-natives of Persians. The subject of the present article is the study of how auditory perception of sentence structures with verbs containing different types of grammatical tenses in Persian is affected by representational complexity of their inner tenses. The Persian language has a variety of absolute and relative tenses, each of which is used as needed, and Mahmoodi-Bakhtiari (Mahmoodi-Bakhtiari 2002) has written in detail about the nature and function of each, and since this work is a comprehensive description of the topic of time in Persian, it provides the basis for data collection of the present study. The two main research questions are: a) Which types of tense is processed faster than the others and why? B) According to data from the Persian language, what is the mental representation of grammatical tense in Persian? The two hypotheses corresponding to the questions of this research are that there is a significant difference between the processing time of sentences containing different types of tenses and also the complexity of these representations has a psychological reality. In order to answer the questions, two experiments have been developed. 4. CONCLUSION (1) The principles and generalizations inferred from the results; The choice of mean reaction time as a dependent variable in widely used cognitive experiments is due to convenience. In this study, reaction time to the auditory stimulus is the basis for measuring cognitive load. Cognitive load refers to the amount of mental energy needed to perform a task. This mental energy can be nourished by memory, storage and retrieval. (2) Any exceptions to, or problems with these principles and generalizations; Here, there has been found no exceptions or problems with the cognitive load principles and generalizations. (3) Theoretical and/or practical implications of the work; If we consider cognitive burden as the basis of learning, this research can have implications for teaching Persian language. The high reputation of using reaction time in psychological research, especially in the field of cognition and language processing, is something beyond theoretical interest. The concept of cognitive burden can be used in teaching Persian language and the research results can be considered in compiling educational materials and materials.

The main question of the present study is that of psycholinguistic reality of Relative Tense in Persian; How Persian tenses are processed? Cross modal lexical decision tasks applied by dmdx software program have been used here to examine relative tense processing during sentence processing. Theoretical framework used here is that of Comrie (1985) linguistically and Shapiro (1990) psycholinguistically. Independent variable is the type of tense used in the verb form and the dependent variable is subjects
reaction times to visual stimuli. 25 university students aged 18-30 participated in experiments who were divided into two groups; male and female participants. The results of the first experiment showed that sentences containing non-finite relative tense verbs, are processed later than the other tenses (present perfect, past perfect, and subjunctives). The explanation is to be found in the un-markedness of non-finites (lacking mood, tense, number). The results of the second experiment also showed that converting simple sentences to the complex ones will erase the meaningful differences in the participants
reaction times. This shows that the independent variable of sentence type is much more effective on cognitive load than tense type. In these two experiments the gender of the participants is not effective. The findings can be used in curriculum design for non-natives of Persians as it shows the cognitive load of relative tenses across memory.

Dynamic Assessment is an approach to assessment within Applied Linguistics which is stemmed from Vygotsky’ s Socio-Cultural Theory of mind, his concept of Zone of Proximal Development and Feuerstein’ s theory of Structural Cognitive Modifiability. This study is an attempt to pinpoint the sources of mental processing problems in listening comprehension and applies dynamic interventions to remove the problems and promote listening. Two male classes (each containing 5 upperintermediate members) ranging in age from 19 to 24, were selected based on an intact group design. One class was selected as the control and another class as the experimental group haphazardly. The research was on the pre-test, mediation, and post-test paradigm. In the beginning, the two groups were pre-tested purposefully and their real time listening problems were detected through verbal and nonverbal recall protocols. Then, in the mediation phase dynamic group experienced different treatment sessions in two weeks to overcome the problems detected on the pre-test. The experimental group was instructed with mediations based on the Sandwich format of interventionist dynamic assessment while the control group received no intervention and was taught traditionally. Finally, all two groups were post-tested. The qualitative analysis showed that both groups suffered from various listening problems related to mental processing in comprehension. Result of quantitative analysis also revealed that the experimental group which was instructed dynamically outperformed the control group which was taught non-dynamically. The findings of this study suggest that dynamic interventions would not only affect the promotion of the EFL listening comprehension in educational settings but also have a significant effect on the performance of the dynamic group in comparison with the nondynamic group.