For students studying in English as a foreign language (EFL) contexts, there are few opportunities to engage with English outside the classroom. The Internet, more importantly, the access to English content and English discourse communities it provides, however, has the potential to transform the language learning experience. With the overarching goals of improving EFL student’s listening fluency and promoting independent lifelong learning, this study reports on Japanese EFL students self-selecting English listening content online. Students were asked to listen to three online texts a week throughout a 15-week semester. Student engagement was tracked with a post-listening log, which was analyzed to explore students’ material selections, problems or difficulties experienced while listening and reflections on the listening content. Student perceptions of this homework task were also collected in a post-treatment questionnaire. It was found most students had positive perceptions of this style of learning task and the most frequently chosen materials included Ted Talks, ESL Fast texts, YouTube and BBC news.

Paper published in conference proceedings:
Milliner, B. (2017). Using online extensive listening to promote language input in an EFL
context. In J. Colpaert, A. Aerts, R. Kern & M. Kaiser (Eds.), CALL in Context Proceedings (pp. 575-581). Belguim: The University of Antwerp. 
https://www.academia.edu/33774797/Using_online_extensive_listening_to_promote_language_input_in_an_EFL_context.pdf