Wim Gombert

56 CHAPTER 4 ABSTRACT is chapter compares the receptive skills—reading and listening—a er six years of instruction in two di erent Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) programs. e rst one is a weak version with a structure-based (SB) syllabus at its foundation and the other a strong version that takes a dynamic usage-based (DUB) approach. It is argued that both reading and listening skills heavily depend on lexical knowledge rather than grammatical knowledge, and that therefore grammar knowledge plays less of a role in these skills. Moreover, many studies have shown that lexical knowledge is related to the amount of exposure in reading or listening. Because the SB students read a great deal to prepare for their central exams, little di erence between the two groups is expected in terms of reading. However, the DUB students have been exposed to oral language a great deal more than the SB students; therefore, the DUB students are expected to outperform their SB counterparts in this skill. e results indeed show that the SB and DUB learners had comparative reading comprehension scores a er six years, but the DUB learners obtained signi cantly higher listening comprehension scores.

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