The Impact of the Application of the Concept Mapping Technique of Fill-in the-Map on the Iranian EFL Learners' Listening Comprehension

Listening is the ability to identify and understand what others are saying. This involves understanding a speaker's accent or pronun ciation, his grammar and vocabulary, and grasping his meaning. Listening is a psycholinguistic process in that it starts with a linguistic representation encoded by a speaker and ends with the meaning that the listener constructs. There is thus an essential interaction between language and thought in listening. The speaker encodes thought as language and the listener decodes language to thought. However, listening, particularly in second language learning, is problematic for learners. As a result, second language teachers must recognize and implement effective listening approaches in their classrooms. One of the most commonly used strategies in listening is "concept mapping". The concept maps are visual instruments to comprehend the content of the text. The concept map technique can be introduced to the students in different forms. Variation in tasks, response formats, and scoring systems produce different mapping techniques. Fill-in the-map is one of them. The present study is an attempt to understand whether this concept map technique has any significant impact on listening comprehension of Iranian EFL learners. The study was conducted on 60 female EFL learners at Kavosh English Language School  in the first district of Tehran. After ensuring the homogeneity of the students by using a standard achievement  test, they were randomly  assigned to experimental  and control groups. A listening pre-test was used to determine the students' level of listening comprehension. Thereafter, the students in both groups were trained in listening in accordance to their treatment conditions; namely the experimental group with a concept map technique, fill-in-the-map, and the control group with no concept mapping. Following the training sessions, a parallel test as a post-test on listening comprehension was given to all students. A t-test  between  the obtained   means  of  the experimental   and Control  group on the post-test revealed that there was a signifi cant difference between the performance of the experimental and control groups. As a result, the null hypothesis  was rejected and it was concluded that the employment  of the fill-in-the-map  technique has a positive effect on Iranian EFL learners' listening comprehension.