An experiment combining listening comprehension training and error analysis was conducted with students at the English Language Institute, Queens College, the City University of New York. The purpose of the study was to investigate how to take learners who were primarily dependent on perceptive skills for comprehension and widen their comprehension systems. The students were given the opportunity to formulate and test hypotheses on oral texts and to discover the strategies they could have been using. The goal of the experiment was to prepare the learners for the test of English as a foreign language (TOEFL) examination, to prepare them for meeting the communicative demands of the real world, and to investigate the possibilities of rethinking and reapplying the principle of autonomous learning in a framework of institutional constraints. Learners were presented with a variety of texts from radio talk-shows, news broadcasts, radio commercials, comedy sketches, and semi-authentic recordings of native speakers carrying out certain speech acts. The predominant activities were detailed listening and completing partial transcripts of oral texts. Papers were collected and errors were listed and classified. Follow-up sessions provided opportunity for feedback and discussion of learners' hypotheses, along with the corrected versions. Examples of the activity are included. (AMH)