Introduction
Comprehending spoken English is certainly not easy for EFL learners, in part because their first language dominates most of their communication; learning how to listen largely through formal instruction in the classroom and with limited exposure to English outside the context of formal study. Even when taking a classroom English listening test regardless whether it being high stakes or not, learners are usually confronted with a number of difficulties, including limited vocabulary, unfamiliar topical knowledge, fast speech rates, unfamiliar accents, and listening only once, to name but a few. Among these factors, lack of vocabulary knowledge seems to cause the most worry to EFL learners (Boyle, 1984, Chang, 2005 and Chang and Read, 2006) and due to this reason, it has become a common practice to become familiar with some lexical items before doing a listening task. Therefore, providing test-takers with pre-task activities may increase their confidence and make them feel the task is less demanding.