A Study of the Impact of Online Feedback on Moroccan EFL University Students’ Listening Proficiency

Abstract

Although technology has been widely integrated into language teaching, research on its impact on EFL students’ listening proficiency and subskills still needs to be explored. This study aims to address this gap, stressing the role of online feedback in language acquisition. The significance of this study is manifested in the potential application of online feedback in the EFL arena and other related learning settings worldwide. This quasi-experimental study investigates how online feedback influences the listening subskills of engineering students at the National School of Applied Sciences (ENSA) in Berchid, Morocco. The study addressed the following question: To what extent does online feedback affect students’ overall listening proficiency? Through convenience sampling, 60 second-year students were singled out: 30 were assigned to the experimental group and 30 to the control group. Using the pretest-posttest design, the current study aimed to determine whether students improved their listening proficiency and subskills using the ProProfs platform, which gave detailed and interactive feedback. Independent samples t-tests showed significant improvements for the experimental group in listening for gist, specific information, and filtering information, although not in inferring implicit information. The findings of the current study indicated that technology-enhanced feedback could be a successful way of improving EFL students’ listening proficiency and subskills, and hence, it called for further integration into tertiary language education.