CHAPTER 4. Reading and listening skills 67 greatly bene t from a more entrenched auditory vocabulary and the mastery of chunks that can be the result of abundant L2 exposure in this DUB program. Finally, students’ listening anxiety caused by the ephemerous and timed character of auditory input, especially during listening tests, is expected to be reduced considerably as students develop a certain listening ease caused in particular by target language practice. In the DUB program, students are expected to speak only French in class, which also helps maintain form-meaning mappings in everyday conversation, and a er six years, listening to French L2 is business as usual and anxiety is greatly reduced as a result of routine mechanisms. To summarize, an increased exposure to written language in an SB program has led to reading skills to develop as e ectively as in a DUB program. However, due to the complex nature of listening skills, a great deal of oral L2 exposure is needed to induce segmentation and phonological memory skills and to reduce listening anxiety which might explain why a DUB program, with a great deal of exposure to oral language, may be held responsible for a more e ective development of listening skills. Although reading skills do bene t from an explicit training program which is a major part of the L2 curriculum in most schools in the Netherlands, such a program needs considerable time in order to be bene cial. is study has convincingly shown that reading skills will develop implicitly and reach a satisfactory level without such a program. e level of oral skills (speaking and listening) will clearly bene t from frequent exposure to and active use of the target language (major tenets of the DUB approach), while the level of written skills (reading and writing) will remain target-like. Consequently, if we consider oral skills to be the main goal of L2 instruction, it is rather strange that the nal L2 exams in the Netherlands only test reading skills. Testing oral skills instead of reading skills would align the nal exam with this goal.
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