| This study examines the development of listening comprehension skills in students completing the elementary year of Spanish instruction at the university level. In addition, the degree of anxiety reported concerning language classes is explored, given the importance of affect within the Natural Approach and other proficiency-oriented approaches to foreign language teaching.;The dissertation outlines some of the current research dealing with the development of the listening comprehension skill in foreign language pedagogy, and also examines some of the debates in which researchers are now engaged. These include the accuracy issue, the role of grammar in proficiency-oriented teaching, and the applicability of Krashen's Input Hypothesis (1982 and elsewhere) to the classroom. Also considered are various opinions as to the primacy of affect as a force in language acquisition.;An experiment was carried out in which students instructed by both the Natural Approach and a four-skills, post-audiolingual method is described. In the experiment, the two groups were given the listening portion of the National Spanish Examination as well as an Oral Test in which a subset of students in each group responded in English to questions posed in Spanish. In addition, participants filled out a questionnaire designed to measure their level of "language anxiety", that is, to measure how comfortable they felt in the foreign language classroom setting. An additional discrete-item test was carried out following the previous testing. Here, a group of NA students were asked to define in English a set of key lexical and grammatical items extracted from the questions posed in the Oral Test. These data shed some light on the areas of weakness and strength in the listening comprehension of the students examined.;The results provide evidence to support the theory that the Natural Approach does equip students with superior listening skills, especially an increased ability to extract the general meaning of an utterance while focusing on the meaning rather than the form. Terrell has claimed that this process most closely mirrors real-life communication. Also, NA students report a significantly lower level of language anxiety overall, notably in the areas of comprehension and performance. Implications of these findings and areas for further research are also discussed. |
