| Summary: | <p>Listening comprehension strategies have been explored almost exclusively in uni-directional listening when learners are listening to audio recording. The lack of research on students' strategy use in understanding the teacher in the classroom is surprising, given how pervasive it is for students to listen to the teacher. In order to fill this research gap, this study explored the listening strategies adopted by learners in comprehending the teacher’s input in the English as a Second Language (ESL) classroom in Hong Kong (HK). A Likert-scale questionnaire was developed and administered to 867 HK Secondary 3 students, 646 of whom also completed two tests of linguistic knowledge (LK) – a receptive Vocabulary Levels Test (VLT) and a grammaticality judgement task (GJT). A sub-sample of 59 students then took part in an innovative computer tracking programme which simulated classroom learning and incorporated different types of teacher input while eliciting learners' strategy use targeted at these inputs. Lesson observation and stimulated recall interviews were also conducted to give insight into learners’ strategy use in an authentic lesson from a more qualitative point of view.</p> <p>Findings suggested that there were some strategies which were specific to the context of listening to the teacher in the ESL classroom. Furthermore, while learners with low and high LK demonstrated some differences in their strategy use, there existed a sub-group of learners with low LK who were at least comparably strategic with learners with higher LK, providing some evidence that strategy use is not wholly dependent on levels of LK. Finally, findings also pointed to the importance of the type and difficulty of teacher input on learners’ strategy use. Implications for further research and pedagogy are discussed.</p>
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