Listening Beyond the Text: Reframing Extensive Listening Through Digital Audiobooks in EFL Contexts

Listening instruction in EFL contexts frequently privileges short, test-oriented audio materials, limiting opportunities for sustained exposure and learner autonomy. While extensive listening has been proposed as a fluency-building approach, its implementation often remains under-supported and narrowly audio-based. Although audiobooks have been explored in reading-while-listening research, their potential to reconceptualize extensive listening as a multimodal, strategy-driven practice remains insufficiently examined. This mixed-method case study investigates how digital audiobooks reshape extensive listening practices in an Indonesian undergraduate EFL classroom. Twenty-five second-semester students participated in a semester-long audiobook-integrated course. Questionnaire results (20-item Likert scale) reveal strong metacognitive engagement, with repetition as the most frequent strategy (M = 67.6%), followed by transcript-supported listening (M = 64.1%), strategy use awareness (M = 63.5%), accent recognition development (M = 62.1%), and playback control utilization (M = 62.1%). However, confidence without textual scaffolding remained moderate (M = 51.7%), indicating transitional listening independence. Thematic interview findings further demonstrate initial accent-related difficulty, followed by increased emotional immersion, vocabulary noticing, and sustained listening motivation. The study reframes extensive listening as a multimodal, self-regulated process in which digital audiobooks function not merely as input sources but as tools for fostering strategic processing, affective engagement, and learner autonomy. By positioning audiobooks within contemporary theories of metacognitive listening and multimodal input, this research contributes to expanding extensive listening pedagogy and offers implications for digitally mediated language instruction in higher education EFL settings.   terms, which reviewers will expect given your powerful title.