SUMMARY
This study discusses the findings of a qualitative study on the strategies used by Iranian female freshmen in narrow listening. The data collected through semi-structured interview with 12 female freshmen (four learners as advanced, four as intermediate and four as low) chosen purposefully based on their scores in the Oxford Placement Test administered. Six out of 12 freshmen were identified for the think-aloud protocol to draw out the strategies they used. The data collected were analyzed using open, axial, and selective-coding. The analysis of the participants’ interview and think-aloud protocol data generated 12 major themes. Five themes (attention, readiness, evaluating, autonomous learning, and change the speech rate) described meta-cognitive; five themes (imitating and repeating, references, visualization, making notes while listening and word-by-word and sentence-by-sentence attention) described cognitive strategies and two themes (asking for help, self-talk) described socio-affective strategies. These strategies need to be taught explicitly to increase learners’ understanding of the spoken texts in the second/foreign language. This study recommends that Iranian EFL female freshman university learners’ top-down, bottom-up processing and listening strategy awareness should be cultivated and integrated into the teaching of listening to improve the learners’ listening ability.