ARTICLE TITLE DESIGNING LISTENING MATERIALS FOR ENGLISH FOR ISLAMIC STUDIES (EIS) COURSES

Abstract

A fundamental but often overlooked aspect of English for Specific Purposes (ESP) is listening comprehension, especially in English for Islamic Studies (EIS), where students must process lengthy spoken discourse that includes academic presentations, religious lectures, sermons, and scholarly discussions given in English. In many Islamic higher education contexts, listening teaching is still mostly based on generic English resources that do not adequately address the linguistic, disciplinary, and spiritual aspects of Islamic studies, despite the increasing institutional demand for EIS programs. This pedagogical misalignment frequently leads to low comprehension, low learner engagement, and little application of listening skills in real-world academic settings. . The current study intends to close this gap by creating, implementing, and assessing a collection of contextually grounded listening resources created especially for EIS courses. The study uses a design-based research framework that includes iterative stages of needs analysis, material development, expert validation, classroom implementation, and empirical evaluation. It is based on the principles of ESP material development, communicative language teaching, and discipline-based pedagogy. In order to reflect key topics in Islamic studies, such as theology, ethics, jurisprudence, and current Islamic discourse, authentic and semi-authentic audio texts were chosen and pedagogically modified while still being accessible to learners at the intermediate level. Expert evaluation tools, learner perception surveys, and listening comprehension exams were used to gather data, which was then analyzed using both quantitative and qualitative methods. The results show that learners' listening comprehension skills have significantly improved, their confidence in processing lengthy academic speech has grown, and their views of relevance and utility have increased. The materials' educational coherence and contextual appropriateness are further validated by expert evaluation. The paper makes the case that, in EIS situations, integrating disciplinary material with communicative listening activities can successfully moderate the relationship between language development and subject-matter learning. This research adds to the growing corpus of ESP scholarship by providing a principled model for listening material creation. It also offers useful implications for instructors, curriculum designers, and material makers in Islamic higher education.