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34© Yang, Ming-Nuan, and Shu-Chu Chen 2007
Research article
This open access article is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).
An investigation on junior college students' learning problems in English-learning programs on the radio
Ming-Nuan Yang1, Shu-Chu Chen2
1 Chang Gung Institute of Technology, Taiwan
E-mail: jessica@gw.cgit.edu.tw
2 National Yunlin University of Science and Technology, National Chengchi University, Taiwan
E-mail: ChenSC@yuntech.edu.tw
The purpose of the present study was to examine the learning problems encountered by junior college EFL students when listening to English-learning programs on the radio. Specifically, the study also attempted to explore whether the frequency of listening difficulty varied across different school years and whether it varied across high, intermediate and low English proficiency groups. To identify the listening difficulties that students of different school years and proficiency groups encountered, the Listening Difficulty Questionnaire was administrated to 256 junior college students. The major finding was that among the five factors 'listener' factor caused junior college students' EFL listening problems most often. It was also found that students' listening abilities and school years influenced the average frequency of listening difficulties. Understanding students' learning difficulties may enable EFL teachers to help students develop effective learning strategies and ultimately improve their English listening abilities. Some implications of the findings are discussed along with suggestions for further research.
Received: 5 October 2007
Reviewing editor: Andrey G. Kirillov Accepted: 15 November 2007
Published online: 20 December 2007
Abstract
Keywords
listening problems; listening abilities; English proficiency
For citation
Yang, Ming-Nuan, and Shu-Chu Chen. 2007. "An investigation on junior college students' learning problems in English-learning programs on the radio." Language. Text. Society 1 (2): el06-ell8. https://ltsj.online/2007-01-2-yang-chen-01. (Journal title at the time of publication: SamaraAltLinguo E-Journal.)
1. INTRODUCTION
In learning a foreign language, listening provides inputs for learners to make learning occur. Listening is the form of verbal communication most frequently employed in the foreign language classrooms. Over half of the time learners are using their listening skills. Yet, for most people, listening skill is seen as a secondary skill, and it will develop naturally within the process of language learning. As a result, it remains the most neglected and the least understood aspect of language teaching (Glisan 1985). In fact, listening is a complex mental process that involves perception, attention, cognition, and memory. Comprehending speech in a foreign language is a quite difficult task for language learners. When listening to a foreign language, all language learners face difficulties. In order to help students improve their listening ability, language teachers have to understand students' listening difficulties in comprehending spoken texts, and instruct effective listening strategies to help students solve their listening difficulties.
Listening to English-learning programs has become prevalent among English learners in Taiwan and is highly recommended as a good way to improve English listening comprehension nowadays. In a place like Taiwan where English is not the official language and where opportunities for listening and speaking English outside the classroom are rare, these English learning programs are definitely one of the most valuable sources of input for learning English. No doubt, these students who received very little training of EFL listening in junior high school will have great difficulties in listening to these English learning programs. They definitely need proper guidance and significant training in learning English listening comprehension. The purpose of this study, therefore, is to investigate the difficulties encountered by junior college students when listening to English learning programs on the radio. Since little research exists on the effects of listening proficiency levels and school years on listening difficulties of junior college students, the study also explores whether the frequency of listening difficulties varies across different school years and whether it varies across different listening proficiency groups.
1.1. Review of Literature
Flowerdew and Miller (1992) conducted a study to examine EFL learners' difficulties and strategies in listening to academic lectures. It was found that the top five listening difficulties were identified as speed of delivery, new terminology and concepts, difficulties in concentrating and problems related to physical environment. A study by Lynch (1997) explored a Japanese EFL learner's perceptions of listening difficulties during and after a pre-sessional English for Academic Purposes course in U.K. The participant reported difficulties in following small-group
tutorials by which he could understand the tutor adequately but not his British fellow students. Hasan (2000) has provided empirical evidence to identify the kinds of listening problem encountered by 81 intermediate EFL learners in Syria. The findings of the study revealed that 'unfamiliar words', 'difficult grammatical structures', and 'the length of the spoken text' are the most important message factors for listening problems. In terms of speaker factor, it was revealed that 'clarity' was the main cause of EFL listening difficulties. As to listener factor, 'lack of interest' 'the demand for full and complete answers to listening comprehension questions' were the two main difficulties encountered by EFL students. Finally, Goh (2000) investigated real-time listening difficulties faced by a group of ESL learners within the three-phase model of language comprehension proposed by Anderson (1995). It was found that there were 10 problems which occurred during the cognitive processing phases of perception, parsing and utilization. Five problems were related to failure in word recognition and ineffective attention in perceptual processing and others were related to inefficient parsing and failure to utilize the mental representation of parsed input. A comparison of two groups of learners with different listening abilities showed some similarities in the difficulties experienced, but low ability listeners had more low level processing problems.
In Taiwan, Yen (1987) conducted a research to investigate the listening comprehension problems of 24 English majors. The results revealed that most of the subjects encountered listening difficulties in sound discrimination, sound stream division, stress and intonation, vocabulary, phrase and syntax. Sun's study (2002) examined listening problems of 40 EFL college students. In the study, the participants were required to write listening diaries over a fourteen-week period. The results showed that the major listening difficulties were that they forgot the meaning of the word when they were listening to a passage and they could not remember what had been heard. In a similar vein, Chen (2002) examined 190 college students' listening problems. The top five listening difficulties were that they 'cannot chunk streams of speech,' they 'neglect the next part when thinking about meaning,' they 'do not recognize words they know,' they were 'confused about the key ideas in the message,' and they were 'unable to form a mental representation from words heard.' Teng (2002) studied 95 technology institute students' listening difficulties through a questionnaire with 43 Liker-scale items and 8 open-ended questions. Among the 43 listening factors, listeners' EFL proficiency had the highest frequency, followed by speakers' clarity and listeners' concentration.
Few studies explore whether students with different school years have encountered different listening difficulties. And little research has focused on the difficulties encountered by high level and low level students. Therefore, the present study aims to study the listening difficulties of junior college students from various school years and the effect of listening proficiency on listeners' listening problems.
1.2. Research Questions
The present study set out to seek answers to the following research questions: 1. Do the listening difficulties encountered by junior college students vary by school years
and listening proficiency levels?
2. What are the differences between the listening difficulties encountered by high proficiency
group and low proficiency group?
Based on the result of the study, it is hoped that EFL teachers can have a better understanding of their students' listening difficulties and examine their own teaching methods to improve students' listening comprehension. Knowing why some of the problems occur will naturally place teachers in a better position to guide their learners in ways of overcoming some of their listening difficulties. It is also hoped that the findings about students' listening difficulties can provide English teachers with some guidelines for material evaluation and selection.
2. METHODOLOGY
2.1. Subjects
The 256 participants chosen for this study were all non-English major students who studied at a junior college in northern Taiwan. Three classes each were selected from second-year and fourth-year junior college students. All of them had to take a course, "General English Listening" from first year to fourth years. The time period for this course was one hour per week. The textbooks were Let's Talk in English for second-year students and Live for fourth-year students.
2.2. Instrumentation
The instrument used in the data collection was a listening difficulty questionnaire, which was developed on the basis of the previous studies (Rubin 1994; Boyle 1984; Goh 2000; Teng 2002; Chao and Cheng 2004). The questionnaire consisted of two sections. Section one contained 11 questions to collect subjects' English learning experience, time spent on listening to English learning programs on the radio, ways of practicing listening skill, motivation of learning English, the importance of listening skill and their self-rated English listening proficiency level. Section two included 51 items grouped into five categories: listening process (11 items), text (13 items), speaker (6 items), listener (11 items) and task (10 items).
2.3. Procedure
The data on the listening difficulty questionnaire were collected after the mid-term exam week of the fall semester. The researcher contacted the English teachers of the subjects in person to get approval for asking their students to participate in the study. The questionnaire was administered to all subjects under the subject's English teacher's supervision in language laboratories of the school. Subjects were told that the questionnaire to be distributed contained questions about their listening difficulties encountered during listening process. They were assured that neither their teachers nor any person, other than the researcher, would have access to their responses and their names would not be used in reporting the results. The questionnaire administration took approximately 25 minutes for each class.
3. DATA ANALYSIS
Students' listening proficiency levels were assessed on the basis of student's self-rated English listening proficiency reported in item 4 of section one of the questionnaire. In this item, students were asked to self-rate their listening proficiency ability as (1) Very Poor, (2) Poor, (3) Average, (4) Good, or (5) Very Good. The low level was defined as the level for students that rated their listening ability as (1) Very Poor or (2) Poor, the intermediate level was defined for students that self-rated their listening ability as (3) Average, while the High level was defined for students that self-rated their English ability as (4) Good or (5) Very Good.
Students' listening proficiency and school year served as independent variables, while listening difficulties served as dependent variables. The results of this analysis helped to address the first research question, whether the students' listening proficiency and school year had significant effect on their listening difficulties.
4. RESULTS
An analysis of listening difficulty of five categories was conducted. As shown in Table 1, the main difficulty factor encountered by both second-year and fourth-year students was 'listener' factor, followed by 'text' factor. In terms of proficiency, the main difficulty factor for all three proficiency groups was the listener factor. It is surprisingly to note that the means of listening difficulties encountered by fourth-year students are higher than those of second-year students in listening process (means = 3.28 & 3.03), listener (means = 3.55 & 3.52) and task (means = 3.38 & 3.22) factors.
Fourth-year students tended to have much more listening difficulties than second-year students. In terms of proficiency level, the means of listening difficulties for higher proficiency students were lower than those for lower proficiency students in all of the five factors.
Table 1. Means and Standard Deviations of the Five Listening Difficulty Factors for the Two
School Year Groups and Three Proficiency Levels
Factor Level Proficiency Level
Year
Low Intermediate High Total
Mean S.D. Mean S.D. Mean S.D. Mean S.D.
Process 2nd-year 3.55 0.61 2.71 0.46 2.42 0.56 3.03 0.71
4th-year 3.63 0.56 2.98 0.40 2.81 0.53 3.28 0.60
Total 3.59 0.58 2.84 0.45 2.57 0.57 3.15 0.67
Listener 2nd-year 3.78 0.41 3.40 0.45 3.10 0.64 3.52 0.52
4th-year 3.76 0.39 3.41 0.32 3.13 0.55 3.55 0.44
Total 3.77 0.40 3.40 0.39 3.11 0.60 3.53 0.48
Speaker 2nd-year 3.14 0.72 3.12 0.47 2.49 0.80 3.04 0.68
4th-year 3.11 0.60 3.01 0.54 2.78 0.50 3.03 0.57
Total 3.12 0.66 3.07 0.51 2.61 0.70 3.03 0.63
Text 2nd-year 3.60 0.50 3.41 0.38 2.93 0.63 3.42 0.52
4th-year 3.47 0.50 3.31 0.41 3.23 0.60 3.38 0.48
Total 3.53 0.50 3.36 0.40 3.05 0.63 3.40 0.50
Task 2nd-year 3.58 0.61 3.09 0.59 2.53 0.77 3.22 0.72
4th-year 3.56 0.45 3.29 0.46 2.88 0.29 3.38 0.49
Total 3.57 0.53 3.18 0.54 2.67 0.65 3.29 0.62
Table 2. A Two-way ANOVA of Listening Difficulty of the Five Factors As Encountered by the Two
School Year Groups and Three Proficiency Levels
Factor Source SS df MS F Significance
Process Year 2.79 1 2.79 10.10 *p < .05
Proficiency 41.73 2 20.86 75.34 *p < .05
Interaction 0.83 2
Total 2664.52
Listener Year 0.001 1 0.001 0.007
Proficiency 13.89 2 6.95 37.24 *p < .05
Interaction 0.02 2
Total 3263.77
Speaker Year 0.09 1 0.09 0.25
Proficiency 6.007 2 3.004 8.01 *p < .05
Interaction 0.92 2 0.461 1.23
Total 2457.46
Text Year 0.018 1 0.018 0.08
Proficiency 5.36 2 2.68 11.54 *p < .05
Interaction 1.20 2
Total 3012.00
Year 1.43 1 1.43 4.74 *p < .05
Proficiency 21.27 2 10.63 35.15 *p < .05
Interaction 1.15 2 0.579 1.91
Total 2888.80
ANOVA results in Table 2 show that of all the five listening difficulty factors, process and task categories show significant difference in difficulties encountered by students with different school year (F = 10.10 and 4.74 respectively, p < .05) and proficiency levels (F = 75.34 and 35.15, p < .05). However, there is no interaction between different school years and proficiency levels. In listener, speaker and text factors, there are significant differences in listening difficulties encountered by students with different proficiency levels (F = 37.24, 8.01 and 11.54, p < .05). In a word, it shows that high level group and low level group do have highly significant differences in their listening difficulties.
Table 3. Top Ten Listening Difficulties Encountered by High Level Students
Item Rank Factor Description Mean S.D.
34 1 Listener Limited vocabulary 4.00 0.70
20 2 Text Unfamiliar words in the text 3.81 0.76
33 3 Listener Limited grammatical knowledge 3.72 0.94
21 4 Text Linking sound 3.54 0.86
12 5 Speaker Speed of delivery 3.42 0.83
39 6 Listener Unfamiliar contents 3.36 0.99
23 7 Text Without enough pause 3.33 0.88
26 8 Text Lengthy sentence 3.27 0.94
27 8 Text Repetition of the material 3.27 1.03
42 10 Listener Little practice in English listening 3.24 1.06
Table 4. Top Ten Listening Difficulties Encountered by Low Level Students
Item Rank Category Description Mean S.D.
34 1 Listener Limited vocabulary 4.23 0.56
20 2 Text unfamiliar words in the text 4.19 0.68
33 3 Listener Limited grammatical knowledge 4.17 0.81
3 4 Process Lack of concentration 4.15 0.89
37 5 Listener Poor EFL proficiency 4.12 0.80
42 6 Listener Little practice in English listening 4.07 0.81
21 7 Text Linking sound 4.01 0.80
43 8 Listener Unable to catch up with speaker's speed 3.99 0.70
39 9 Listener Unfamiliar contents 3.97 0.74.
12 10 Speaker Speed of delivery 3.94 0.83
Table 3 lists the top ten listening difficulties encountered by high level students. Limited vocabulary caused the most serious listening difficulty, followed by unfamiliar words in the text and listener's limited grammatical knowledge. As shown in Table 4, the most serious listening difficulties encountered by low level students were same as those faced by high level students. These ten items all displayed significant differences between high level and low level students. Compared with high level students, low level students tended to attribute their listening difficulties to themselves, listener factor. In contrast, high level students were more aware of the listening difficulties in the text factor than low level students.
5. DISCUSSION
In the present study, listener factor held the highest mean, followed by text factor, the task factor, listening process and the speaker factor. It revealed that the junior college students tended to attribute their listening difficulties to their personal factors. This finding is in accordance with the findings of the previous studies (Chao and Cheng 2002; Yagang 1993), however, it is not consistent with those of Teng (2002), which showed that stimulus and speaker factor caused the most listening difficulties among technology institute students. Moreover, low level group had significantly more difficulties than high level group. This finding is correspondent with the findings of Goh (2000) and Hasan (2000).
In addition, the statistical analysis indicated there were major differences in listening difficulty among students of different proficiency levels. The statistical analysis also revealed that fourth-year students encountered much more difficulties than second-year students in listening process and task factor. The findings of the present study do not agree with those of Tsai's (2005)
study, which showed seniors' average frequency of encountering listening difficulties was lower than freshmen's. According to Tsai, students' learning English for at least six or seven years, encountered far less difficulties than did less experienced language learners. However, in this study, the listening difficulty did not decrease with students' advance in school year.
It seems that the fourth-year students were unable to overcome the basic perception problems in their listening process, even though they have learned English for more than 7 years. They had more problems in not being able to pay attention to the following part when they were thinking about the meaning of the previous part. The possible cause is that listeners listened to the text word by word, if they missed the meaning of one word, they spent much time figuring out the meaning of the word and missed out the incoming message that they had to pay attention to. In addition to this problem, the fourth-year students also reported that they were often unable to get the meaning of the message even when they had understood all the words. This problem was most likely due to their limited inference skills. They could not use the literal meaning to understand its intended meaning. These problems could also be related to insufficient practice in English listening, which would otherwise be useful for improving English listening skill. This could be evidenced by the fact that the fourth-year students reported the average time they spent in listening to the English learning program was about 40 minutes a week and 40 of them (32.3%) even reported that they never did any listening practice. Listening to these English learning radio programs every day has been these students' required routine as one part of their English listening course. In fact, these students did not regularly practice their skills. Finally, when the listening material contained more unfamiliar words and complicated syntactic structures, their problem would become even more serious. As a result, their poor vocabulary knowledge, inadequate listening strategy, lack of practice and difficult text would naturally have led to numerous listening problems.
The fourth-year students reported that the listening task demanding productive skills was the main obstacle while they were requested to do listening tasks. According to Hasan (2000), asking listeners to answer detailed answers or to recall the facts after they are listening to a listening text is testing rather than teaching. In listening class, these students are usually required to recall the facts and details of the listening text to prove their comprehension. They do not have many opportunities to make an oral summary in English, therefore, it is regarded as the most difficult listening problem in the task factor. Although the second-year students' mean of frequency of listening task was lower than that of fourth-year students, it should not be taken for granted to mean that they were better at making summary in English than the fourth-year students. What was more likely was that the second-year students hardly ever got the chance to make oral report in English.
When the top ten listening problems encountered by high level and low level learners were closely checked, it was found that the difference in listening proficiency between high level and low level learners seems to be related to the frequency of listening problems they faced. The results revealed that listeners' limited vocabulary capacity caused the most serious listening difficulty for both high level and low level students. This finding is correspondent with the findings of previous studies. Many researchers have found that lack of lexis was the major obstacle to listening comprehension (Kelly 1991; Laufer and Sim 1985; Liu 2000). Owing to their insufficient listening practice, junior college students did not listen to English texts extensively.
Consequently, these students were not able to develop enough listening vocabulary to comprehend the spoken text. The lack of appropriate amount of lexical knowledge would hinder learners' language perception and production.
For the listening process, low level learners were unable to pay attention to the next part when they were thinking about meaning of the previous text. The reason might be that the low achievers, unlike high achievers, were unable to process the information fast because they had not stored the word-referent relationships efficiently in long-term memory. Another possible explanation for this problem is that their listening vocabulary was underdeveloped. It means that their sound-to-script relationships have not been automatized (Goh 2002). Accordingly, even though learners knew certain words by sight, they could not recognize them by sound. This underdeveloped listening vocabulary could have been caused by the way the students learn new words. According to Yang (2005), most of junior college students learnt new words by written repetition and often neglected to remember how the sounds sounded. Learning listening skill by reading key words, their Chinese equivalents and Chinese translation of the transcript might delay their processing time when they tried to understand the sound-script relationship of the words in the initial part of the text. Once the listeners spent too much time on the initial part, the following part would be easy to be missed.
These students attributed the poor listening comprehension to their insufficient practice, especially the low level group had such kind of condition, which is evidenced by the average time they spent in listening practice. High level learners spent about 60 minutes a week in listening to English learning program on the radio, while low level learners about 40 minutes a week. Because of the insufficient practice, these students had less listening vocabulary, which might cause their listening difficulty. Undoubtedly, the more difficulties they have, the less interest they have in listening to English.
6. CONCLUSION
In conclusion, the main source of listening difficulty encountered by junior college students stemmed mainly from listener factor. Significant differences were found between the subjects with different school years in two of the five factors (listening process and task). Students of different proficiency levels differed significantly in the factors of listening process, listener, speaker, text and task. Findings of the study revealed that limited vocabulary was the major listening difficulty encountered by junior college students. Low level students tended to attribute their listening difficulties to their personal factor, while high level students tended to attribute to text factor.
6.1. Pedagogical Implications
According to the findings in the study, three pedagogical implications are offered as follows.
First, since appropriate amount of vocabulary size is the prerequisite for students' successful listening, teachers should have a thorough understanding of students' receptive vocabulary size and choose appropriate teaching materials that suit students' current levels of
vocabulary size. Teachers also have to broaden students' vocabulary size, which in turn can deal with different kinds of learning more easily.
Second, in Taiwan, there are not always enough English inputs available with which students can practice outside of class. According to Huang and Chen (2002), students listening to English radio broadcasting half an hour per day for at least a year really improve their listening comprehension successfully. It seems that the more exposure listeners have in English, the more familiarity they would have toward the listening vocabulary, speed of delivery, and the contents. However, because improvement in listening comprehension is a slow process, any improvement in listening skill could not be made within a short time, listening teachers should train EFL students to acquire the habit of listening to English radio broadcasting programs regularly.
Finally, from the results of the questionnaire, it is surprising to find that 3 low level students, who spent more than three hours a week on English listening, still had a poor performance on listening. Therefore, it is worth noting that although exposure time plays an important role in improving listening comprehension, instruction on effective listening strategies also plays a vital role, especially for unsuccessful learners. In light of Rubin [1990], training in effective listening strategies enhanced students' listening skills and improved students' affect and motivation. Therefore, other than the opportunities of exposure to listening texts, it is imperative for teachers to teach students effective listening strategies to improve students' listening comprehension.
6.2. Limitations of the Study
Only one sample of Chinese junior college students was utilized in this study to gather data for investigation. It would be interesting to replicate the study and also enlarge it by extending learner variables, such as gender and different language backgrounds. To view the whole picture of the listening difficulty encountered by junior college students in Taiwan, qualitative interview can be used to obtain more in-depth information about student's view on listening difficulty.
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Declaration of conflicting interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of
this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.
Author information
Ming-Nuan Yang is an Associate Professor, Chang Gung Institute of Technology.
Shu-Chu Chen is an Instructor, National Yunlin University of Science and Technology, Taiwan & PhD Student, National Chengchi University, Taiwan
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