Abstract:
The study of French as a foreign language poses a lot of challenges to Ghanaian learners. Right from the strict rules of concord and the issues of gender of nouns in written French to challenges associated to the oral French, especially the oral comprehension activities, Ghanaian learners struggle with the study of the French language. The use of listening strategies was strongly recommended for a progressive reduction of listening difficulties among foreign learners in general. In the Ghanaian educational settings however, explicit strategy instruction seems not to have attracted enough interest among teachers and researchers. Consequently, this study sets out to determine the effect of conscious use of listening strategies on the performance of teacher- trainees in listening comprehension test in French classrooms. The study therefore used an experimental approach to conduct listening strategies intervention lessons to help teacher- trainees learn to use strategies consciously in listening comprehension activities in French. Listening comprehension test scores were used to measure the success of the strategy lessons. The results show that the experimental group adopted consciously more frequent use of strategies than the control group after the intervention. The conscious and frequent use of strategies during listening comprehension tests was found to have led to comparatively higher mean scores for the experimental group than the control group. These results suggest that conscious use of strategies has an essential contribution to the development of effective and successful listening skills. The study therefore recommends that teachers explicitly integrate listening strategies into listening comprehension activities of the oral French lessons.
