Insights Into Listening Comprehension Problems: A Case .
PASAAVolume 59January - June 2020Insights into Listening Comprehension Problems:A Case Study in VietnamThao Quoc TranHo Chi Minh City University of Technology (HUTECH)Binh Thanh District, Ho Chi Minh City, 700000 VietnamTham My Duong*Faculty of Foreign Languages and Pedagogy, Nong Lam UniversityThu Duc District, Ho Chi Minh City, 700000 VietnamEmail: tham.duongmy@hcmuaf.edu.vnAbstractIn EFL learning and teaching, listening is believedto be the most challenging of the four macro languageskills. Various obstacles have been reported as causingchallenges to English listening comprehension for EFLlearners. This study, therefore, aimed to determine theEnglish listening comprehension problems of Vietnamesehigh school students as perceived by students and theirteachers. The research was conducted at a high school inHo Chi Minh City, Vietnam with the participation of 368eleventh graders who answered a questionnaire and 8 EFLteachers who took part in semi-structured interviews. analyzed using descriptive statistics (i.e. frequencies/percentages) and content analysis, respectively. Both theteachers and the students pointed out English listeningcomprehension problems relating to perception, parsing,and utilization. In particular, the students encounteredphonological and lexical problems (i.e. high speech cproblems (i.e. long utterances), and discoursal problems (i.e.
78 PASAA Vol. 59 January - June 2020implied meanings, unfamiliar topics, and organization ofideas). The results are discussed in relation to ions are presented.Keywords: listening comprehension, perspectives,problems, Vietnamese EFL contextIntroductionAlthough listening comprehension is a fundamental skill inthe process of acquiring a language, it is deemed one of thehardest skills for learners to master. Additionally, learners mayexperience some difficulty in exchanging information orally if theyare not good at listening (Rost, 2002; Underwood, 1989). In thesame vein, one of the factors negatively affecting ningability(Anderson & Lynch, 2003; Nguyen & Tran, 2015; Ur, 1996). Thissuggests that listening skills are essential for EFL/ESL learnerssince they equip learners with language input. Nevertheless,listening skills have been underemphasized in the Englishlearning process at most Vietnamese schools (Duong & Chau,2019; Nguyen & Thai, 2018). This is because the officialcurriculum for English language learning and teaching in Vietnamhas focused on exam-driven instruction, i.e. students are preparedfor examinations on grammar, reading, and vocabulary ratherthan communicative competence (Bui & Duong, 2018; Denham,1992; Duong, 2014) even though all four macro skills are includedas integral sections in the textbooks at the high school level. As aresult, high school students have few opportunities to practicetheir communication skills, especially their listening skills.Furthermore, they are not provided with linguistics knowledge (i.e.phonology, pragmatics, syntax, and semantics) at this level. As aconsequence, Vietnamese high school students may fail toconduct successful conversations in English. This depressingsituation also occurs at the studied high school, i.e. listening andspeaking skills are undervalued in comparison with other skills.
PASAA Vol. 59 January - June 2020 79Hence, this study endeavored to investigate the EFL listeningcomprehension problems that eleventh graders confront duringtheir learning process. The research questions were formulated asfollows:1. What problems were perceived by 11th graders duringtheir English listening comprehension learning?2. What did the teachers think about their students’English listening comprehension problems?Literature ReviewDefinition of Listening ComprehensionListening comprehension is not an easy or simple conceptdespite the fact that mastering listening comprehension may helplearners acquire a second language. Liu (2008) commented that itwas challenging to construct a specific definition of listeningcomprehension because this term had been defined differently byvarious researchers.Vandergrift (1999) defined listening comprehension as acomplicated interactive process in which listeners must focus onall elements such as sounds, intonation, linguistic structures, andsocial structural contexts. In the same vein, Holden (2004) viewedlistening comprehension as a complicated activity that needsmental exertion to ensure understanding. Furthermore, theauthor argued that listeners have to listen passively and thenproduce what they have comprehended.However, according to Thomson (2003), the listeners areactive in the process of listening comprehension, not passive. Inthis regard, Jinhong (2011) argued that listening comprehensionis not only “a process-oriented activity in which listeners need todeal with the input actively step by step” (p. 6) but also “a creativeactivity [that] listeners construct or assign meanings based on thegiven information or their experience and background knowledge”(p. 7).From the above-mentioned definitions, it can be concludedthat listening comprehension is a complex process in whichstudents need to exert both their language knowledge (i.e.
80 PASAA Vol. 59 January - June 2020vocabulary, sounds, and grammar) and background knowledge tocomprehend what is spoken.Listening Comprehension ProblemsNumerous researchers have focused their studies on thevarious problems and challenges that language learners confrontin listening comprehension (Goh, 2000). Underwood (1989)enumerated some of the hindrances to listening comprehension:(1) listeners cannot control the speed of spoken information; (2)listeners cannot always have words repeated in listening tasks; (3)listeners usually possess a limited vocabulary; (4) listeners mayfail to recognize the signals which indicate that the speaker ismoving from one idea to another, and (5) listeners may lackbackground knowledge.In contrast, Anderson (1995) and Goh (2000) attributedlistening comprehension problems to all the difficulties thatlisteners have during the three phases of perception, parsing, andutilization. Firstly, perception problems are concerned with thelisteners’ failure to recognize intonation, stress, and differentaccents in a speech stream (Anderson, 1995). Phonological andlexical problems are two different types of challenges that listenersface during the perception phase. Additionally, high speech steningcomprehension (Goh, 2000). Secondly, parsing problems includingsyntactic and semantic matters may also occur in the processingphase of listening comprehension. For example, listeners mayquickly forget what is heard, and therefore, they may fail to form amental representation from the words heard (Goh, 2000).Utilization is another phase in the cognitive processing of L2listening comprehension. The issues confronted by EFL/ESLlearners during this phase are normally discourse-related; forexample, listeners may have difficulties in recognizing the overallstructure of the ideas in a text. According to Gilakjani and Ahmadi(2011), unfamiliar listening topics may also hamper students’listening comprehension.
PASAA Vol. 59 January - June 2020 81The present study has been based on the three-phasemodel of listening comprehension problems proposed by Anderson(1995) and Goh (2000) because of its sufficiency and clarity.Previous StudiesThe following is a review of previous studies on Englishlistening problems perceived by EFL students at different levelsand by teachers of English. Hamouda (2013) examined listeningdifficulties that Saudi students encountered in their listeninglearning process. The study was a mixed-methods approachutilizing a questionnaire and an interview. The participants were60 first-year English majors at Qassim University. The findingsrevealed problems relating to speech delivery (i.e. the speed ofspeech, the bad quality of recordings, and the different accents ofthe speakers) and to listeners (i.e. a lack of concentration, anxiety,and insufficient vocabulary). Duong and Chau (2018) conducted astudy in Vietnam in which listening comprehension problems wereaddressed. The data collected from a questionnaire and a semistructured interview were analyzed statistically and qualitatively.The results showed that the 115 English majors found listeningtexts (i.e. unfamiliar words, slangs, idioms, colloquial words, andcomplex sentence structures) the most dominant cause for theirlow listening comprehension. Furthermore, speedy delivery,unclear pronunciation, different accents, anxiety, invisibility forspeakers’ facial expression, and noise affected their listeningcomprehension. In Thailand, Khamprated’s (2012) study exploredthe English listening and speaking problems faced by privatevocational school students and determined the possible causes oftheir problems. Quantitative data were collected by means of aquestionnaire. One of the major findings was the types of Englishlistening problems that the participants commonly reported suchas local accents, the speakers’ speed, cultural differences, andlimited English grammar and lexical resources. A different aspectwas investigated by Alrawashdeh and Al-zayed (2017) in theirstudy of the difficulties encountered by teachers of English inlistening comprehension teaching. A questionnaire for teachers
82 PASAA Vol. 59 January - June 2020and informal interviews were used as the instruments for datacollection. The teachers pinpointed three major problems, namelythe learning environment, the availability of source and teachingaids, and the teachers’ proficiency, which hindered them fromteaching English listening comprehension effectively.MethodologyResearch Setting and ParticipantsThe present study was carried out at a high school in HoChi Minh City, Vietnam. The surveyed school had nine EFLteachers (i.e., eight participated in the main study and one in thepilot study), who were invited to take part in semi-structuredinterviews. All of them were female and had at least five years’experience teaching English as a foreign language. Two out of thenine teachers (22.2%) had an M.A. degree, while each of theremainder (77.8%) had a B.A. degree.Each academic year the school has between 9 and 11classes with 35 to 40 students per class. In total, there between1000 and 1500 students at the school. In the present study, thesample was composed of 368 students in grade 11. Out of the 368student participants, 187 were female (50.82%), and 181 weremale (49.18%). All the participants had learnt English for over fiveyears (i.e. four years at secondary school, and one year at grade10).InstrumentsThere were two types of instruments employed in thisresearch: a closed-ended questionnaire and semi-structuredinterviews. Firstly, the questionnaire contained two sections:Section 1 collected personal information, whereas Section 2 with15 items was used to explore the students’ listening problems interms of perception (6 items), parsing (4 items), and utilization (5items) during their learning process. In Section 2, the participantswere asked to choose the appropriate level for five closed-endeditems on a 5-point Likert scale (1 never, 2 rarely, 3 occasionally, 4 frequently, 5 always). A Cronbach alpha score
PASAA Vol. 59 January - June 2020 83of .75 for the questionnaire indicated that it was internallyconsistent. Before the survey, the questionnaire was piloted withfive students in grade eleven from the same school to test itsclarity in terms of content and form.Secondly, the semi-structured interviews were used tocollect qualitative data. The interviews were conducted privatelywith every teacher to make sure that they had pressure-free ailedinformation and to avoid any language barriers, Vietnamese wasused during the interviews. After translating the transcriptionsinto English, the authors cross-checked them with each other toreduce translation errors. Moreover, to increase the reliability ofthe study, the interview questions were piloted with one teacherthat was excluded from the main study. The interviewees werelabelled TI1 to TI8 in accordance with the order of the interviews.Data Collection and AnalysisBefore collecting the quantitative data, the researchers firstobtained the relevant permissions and then went to each of theclasses to be surveyed to introduce the purpose and significanceof the study. Following this, the researchers carefully explained tothe students how to fill in the questionnaire and then thequestionnaire was given to the students in the class. Theycompleted the questionnaire within 10 minutes and returned it ingfrequencies (F) and percentages (%), for the collected data on thestudents’ listening problems were subsequently calculated usingSPSS 20.0.In addition, eight EFL teachers in charge of these classeswere invited for individual interviews. The interviews wererecorded and later transcribed. Content analysis was used toanalyze the data in three steps. First, the authors keyed the datainto a form and read the transcripts repeatedly in order to becomefamiliar with the content. Next, the collected data were coded andrecoded, and then the coded information was grouped into larger
84 PASAA Vol. 59 January - June 2020categories. Finally, the authors examined the categories andthemes in order to determine any relationships and connections.ResultsThe Eleventh Graders’ Perceptions of Listening ProblemsPerception ProblemsThe data analysis for the first six items in the tionproblemsissummarized in Table 1.Table 1. Questionnaire Results of the Eleventh Graders’ Perception .650.8100Perception problemsI hear sounds but I amnot sure if it is right or Icannot recognize so manysounds.2Fast speech rate makesme miss the beginning ofthe text.3I mistake one word foranother.4I encounter too manyunfamiliar words and/orexpressions.5I miss the next part of thetext while I am thinkingabout the meaning of theearlier part.6Rarely1NeverItemI find it hard toconcentrate.As can be seen in Table 1, a large number of participants(80.4%) admitted that they were frequently unsure about whatthey had listened to and could not recognize all the sounds in thelistening text (Item 1). The same percentage of students reported
PASAA Vol. 59 January - June 2020 85that they found it difficult to concentrate on the listening tasks.Similarly, the fast speech rate resulted in most of them (84.2%)missing the beginning of the listening text (Item 2).In addition, several eleventh graders identified otherlistening problems such as missing a later part of the text whilethinking about the meaning of an earlier part (72%), encounteringtoo many unfamiliar words and expressions (63.1%), andmistaking one word for another (54.1%).In brief, the majority of the eleventh graders teningfailedtorecognize many of the sounds in the listening text while the fastspeech rate caused them to miss the beginning of the listeningtext as well as subsequent parts of the text while they werethinking about the meaning of an earlier part. Furthermore, manystudents encountered a large number of unfamiliar words andexpressions. Finally, most of the eleven-grade students lostconcentration while listening to the texts.Parsing ProblemsThe results for the next five items that were designed touncover the eleventh graders’ parsing problems in their listeningprocess are listed in Table 2. Most of the participants admittedthat they frequently forgot what they had just heard due to thelength of the audio track (84%), and that they could notunderstand the meaning of some words in the sentences (81%).Furthermore, several high school students found it difficultto divide the longer sentences in the listening text into severalparts to assist in comprehension (70.9%) and to understand thenew information within a short time (63.1%).In summary, it can be seen that the eleventh gradersencountered parsing problems (i.e. the length of the text, themeaning of words, the length of some sentences, and the limitedtime) that inhibited their listening comprehension ability.
86 PASAA Vol. 59 January - June 2020Table 2: Questionnaire Results of the Eleventh Graders’ Parsing ProblemsUsuallyAlways81141134175368because of the length.P1.93.011.136.447.6100I cannot understand It is difficult to divide longF19187096165368parts.%5.24.91926.144.8100It is difficult to ing of some words in9sentences into several10Occasionally7sentences just hearda lot of new information ina short time.RarelyFParsing problemsI forget phrases or7NeverItemTotalUtilization ProblemsThe findings for the last five items concerning utilizationproblems are presented in Table 3. The majority of participants inthis study (83.1%) found it difficult to understand what they hadlistened to due to the unfamiliar themes of the material. sorsupporting ideas. Not only did they find it difficult to get detailedinformation, 66.9% of them also experienced problems whenlistening for main rticipants believed that they did not grasp the intended messageof the listening text although they were able to understand themeaning of words (74.5%). They also felt that they had failed toarrange the ideas in the listening text properly to establish therelationships between them (75.5%).In short, a great number of the eleventh graders faced someutilization problems during their listening process such asunfamiliar topics, a failure to grasp the intended message of the
PASAA Vol. 59 January - June 2020 ng,difficulties in arranging the ideas in the listening text so as toestablish any links between them, and confusion about identifyingthe main idea and/or details of the listening text.Table 3: Questionnaire Results of the Eleventh Graders’ Utilization 2.142.4100.0It is difficult to arrangeF11186191187368relationship among ideas.%3.04.916.624.750.8100.0I get confused about 191368%06.016.625.551.9100I have difficulties infollowing unfamiliar topics.I can’t grasp the intended12OccasionallyParsing problemsRarely11NeverItemmessage though I knowideas of a text to get themain idea of the text.I can’t get details orsupporting ideas.The Teachers’ Perceptions and Suggestions about Learners’Listening ProblemsPerception problemsAll the teachers affirmed that their students were confusedabout unfamiliar words or phrases in their listening process.Specifically, six interviewees believed their students were slow inrecalling the meaning of some words or phrases in the listeningtexts, whereas unknown words really challenged the students.According to the teachers, due to the fixed curriculum, they didnot have enough time to provide students with necessary listeningstrategies and ample vocabulary for the listening texts. Meanwhile,some others revealed that the main reason for paying less
88 PASAA Vol. 59 January - June 2020attention to listening skills in their classes was that listening wasonly a mino
Listening Comprehension Problems . Numerous researchers have focused their studies on the various problems and challenges that language learners confront in listening comprehension (Goh, 2000). Underwood (1989) enumerated some of the hindrances to listening comprehension: (1) list
TOEFL Listening Lecture 35 184 TOEFL Listening Lecture 36 189 TOEFL Listening Lecture 37 194 TOEFL Listening Lecture 38 199 TOEFL Listening Lecture 39 204 TOEFL Listening Lecture 40 209 TOEFL Listening Lecture 41 214 TOEFL Listening Lecture 42 219 TOEFL Listening Lecture 43 225 COPYRIGHT 2016
reading comprehension and thus listening comprehension instructional activities can be used as a tool for improving reading comprehension (Hogan, Adlof, and Alonzo, 2014) . As early as 1969, researchers demonstrated that listening comprehension and reading comprehension are two separate co
indicated that learners can improve their listening comprehension through the help of teachers, using suitable materials and activities, and practicing a lot. Index Terms—listening comprehension, reason, process, importance, role, strategies, techniques, goals I. INTRODUCTION Listening comprehension is an important part of language learning.
listening comprehension ability. The key concepts of the listening construct, listening sub-skills and strategies were outlined including the various taxonomies of listening comprehension sub-skills and strategies. The review of literature was followed by collecting data via intro- and retro
Abstract: Listening comprehension is the ability to receive the messages sent by speakers. Yet it is not always easy to decipher these messages and construct meaning. There are factors that should be taken into account in listening comprehension. These factors enable listening
important information. (listening comprehension) Students learn to visualize the information & can describe/draw what they heard (listening comprehension) Effective teacher implementation of read alouds: Pre-teach vocabulary (comprehension and expression) Have students draw, write, or respond orally to what is
Listening Comprehension Ongoing Comprehension Strategy Assessments 1–34 are intended primarily for use as written assessments of reading comprehension. However, they may also be used as measures of listening comprehension. To use them for listening purposes, read the passage aloud to the student(s) and have the student(s) answer the questions.
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