INDONESIAN JOURNAL OF APPLIED LINGUISTICS Vol. 9 No. 2, September 2019, pp. 382-394 Available online at: ejournal.upi.edu/index.php/IJAL/article/view/20236 doi: 10.17509/ijal.v9i2.20236 382 * Corresponding Author Email: rahimi@sru.ac.ir. The cognitive load of listening activities of a cognitive-based listening instruction Mehrak Rahimi* and Mehran Sayyadi English Department, Faculty of Humanities, Shahid Rajaee Teacher Training University, Lavizan, 1678815811, Tehran, Iran ABSTRACT The aim of this study was to investigate the cognitive load (henceforth, CL) of listening activities of a cognitive-based listening instruction of a recently changed EFL curriculum. 126 K-11 students (male=62, female=64) participated in the study. The quantitative and qualtivative data were collected and analyzed in two phases. In phase 1, the participants were asked to judge the CL of listening activities of their textbook based on the CL measure immediately after completeling the tasks. The scale has 10 items that measure three components of CL including Intrinsic Load (IL), Extraneous Load (EL), and Germane Load (GL). The data were analyzed by Multivariate Analysis of Variance (MANOVA). The result primarily revealed that the general cognitive load of listening activities was rather high and when three kinds of CLs were compared, the GL was found to be higher than IL and EL. Comparing the CL of male and female students revealed that there is a signficant difference between the two groups regarding general CL and both IL and EL; and as the GL of both groups was high, no signficant difference was observed between their GL. In pahse 2 of the study, 14 students participated in a structured interview to express their opinions about the difficulty of listening comprehension. The rate of speech and unintelligibility of the speakers’ pronunciation, insufficient technological infrastructures, lack of interest in and negative attitudes towards listening, and limited multidmodal input were among the factors that students felt to contribute to the difficulty of listening comprehension. Keywords: Cognitive load; curriculum change; English; gender; listening First Received: 17 May 2019 Revised: 30 August 2019 Accepted: 5 September 2019 Final Proof Received: 26 September 2019 Published: 30 September 2019 How to cite (in APA style): Rahimi, M. & Sayyadi, M. (2019). The cognitive load of listening activities of a cognitive- based listening instruction. Indonesian Journal of Applied Linguistics, 9, 382-394. doi: 10.17509/ijal.v9i2.20236 INTRODUCTION Listening is a complex cognitive process that plays a key role in language acquisition and development. Listening is one of the four macro language skills (along with speaking, reading, and writing) and “the most widely used language skill in normal daily life” (Martínez-Flor & Usó-Juan, 2006, p. 29) and communication. Listening is differentiated from hearing (Hornsby, 2013) as hearing is just the perception phase of listening where the sounds are discriminated in an automatic process without the hearer’s concentration of effort or attention. Listening, on the other hand, denotes understanding a message that “includes attention, concentration, rate of input, as well as misunderstanding and emotional responses” (Worthington & Bodie, 2018, p. 70) in the process of communication. For a long time listening was regarded as the simple act of decoding linguistic forms (identifying words, sentences, intonation contours, etc.) and a passive skill to master by overlearning. By the emergence of cognitive and communicative frameworks, the focus from automatic/linguistic processing of information during listening was shifted to more cognitive, emotional, and behavioral aspects. It is now believed that there are four main orientations involved in listening including (a) receptive, listening is