Listening Comprehension Difficulties; A Case Study of Efl Students in Listening Class

Abstract

Listening skill in English is one of the most important skills in communication and educational process. However, listening skill is a skill that is not easily mastered by all non-native speaker students. The students need to know and understand the difficulties in listening process. Therefore, the current study aims to investigate the difficulties faced by the students dealing with listening comprehension. This research is a descriptive qualitative research with case study approach that examines six students in third semester of the English education study program in Universitas Muhammadiyah Kotabumi with three different proficiency levels: low, moderate, and high level. The results of this study showed that students with low level faced difficulties with unfamiliar words (message content), speed of speech (speaker), and lack of vocabulary (listener). Then in moderate level students felt difficult in the speed of speech (speaker) and noises (physical settings). Meanwhile, students with high level faced difficulty with the long spoken text (message content), variety of accents (speaker) and noises (physical settings). It can be concluded that the listening comprehension difficulties encountered by the students at tertiary level are different depending on their proficiency in English. Therefore, the implication of the current study is that the lecturer need to consider the information revealed in this study in order to be able to overcome the difficulties faced by the students.

Correlation of Students’ Listening Comprehension Score With Students’ Learning Styles at Students of English Department at University of Muhammadiyah Gresik

“…Listening is a difficult thing among students, especially in English subjects (Rini, 2017). Since learners with an auditory learning style are considered to impact their listening comprehension, it is believed that a student's learning style was a component that impacts listening comprehension.…”

Boosting Listening Skills in Non-English Major Freshmen

“…Numerous researches have demonstrated that listening comprehension is a challenge for English language learners (Ahmadi Safa & Motaghi, 2024;Hardiyanto et al, 2021;Namaziandost et al, 2019). Listening comprehension is regarded as one of the most challenging language skills for non-majors in universities and colleges nowadays.…”

“…Conversely, the conversation and monologue sections require a more complex understanding of context and the ability to follow longer speech flows, which seem to be challenging for students (H. Nguyen & Gu, 2020;Pham & Nguyen, 2021). The difficulties faced in listening to conversations and monologues suggest that students may need more extensive practice and strategies to develop more effective listening skills for longer and more complex text formats (Hardiyanto et al, 2021;Lertcharoenwanich, 2022). The low scores in the monologue section also reflect that the ability to understand and interpret information from a single speaker speaking continuously still needs improvement (Lertcharoenwanich, 2022).…”

A Comparative Study of Authentic Listening Materials for Non-English Major College Students

“…Listening tends to be not easily mastered by all non-English major college students (Hardiyanto et al, 2021). Even though the students are doing well in the English classroom, they often have difficulty in listening to native speakers (Hardiyanto et al, 2021).…”

“…Listening tends to be not easily mastered by all non-English major college students (Hardiyanto et al, 2021). Even though the students are doing well in the English classroom, they often have difficulty in listening to native speakers (Hardiyanto et al, 2021). This issue is also experienced by first-year students at the State Polytechnic of Agriculture Samarinda who are not studying English as their major.…”