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19LISTENING COMPREHENSION PROBLEMS AND STRATEGIES IN THE
ACADEMIC CONTEXT
Xolmatova Nozimaxon Iqbol qizi Teshabayeva Nasibaxon Ibroximovna
English language teachers, Fergana Academic Lyceum of Ministry of Internal Affairs, Republic of Uzbekistan https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7491137
Abstract: it is known that most learners have difficulties in listening in order to understand academic context. Therefore, in this article, useful strategies that were recommended by different researchers are indicated in order to help learners to comprehend the English academic context.
Key words: listening comprehension, difficulties in listening, cognitive strategies, pronunciation, an accent, a dialect.
Many theories have been conducted to investigate listening comprehension in academic context. Although the literature covers a wide variety of such investigations, this review will focus on listening difficulties among ELF learners and what kind of strategies are employed to cope with these problems. These themes are: difficulties related to students' concentration, the listener, the speaker and environment and the usage of cognitive, affective, meta-cognitive, psychomotor-based strategies by English learners in lectures and doing academic listening tasks.
Listening skills are very essential in the second language acquisition as they are fundamental. Problems associated with listening comprehension among EFL learners are misunderstanding the listening materials, lack of concentration, anxiety, different accent of speakers, insufficient vocabulary. A number of researches were carried out to investigate these problems among English learners.
S Y Rajab and V Nimehchisalem (2016) investigated listening comprehension problems and strategies among Kurdish EFL undergraduates. They carried out the study in Salahaddin and Soran Public Universities in Iraqi-Kurdsitan region and the participants (n=165) who were juniors, seniors and freshmen at university were all native speakers of Kurdish and learn English as a second language. They were mostly (60.6) wee female students. They investigated through a structured questionnaire which consists of questions related to process, listener, task, effect and context problems. Similar to this research, L Diora and R N Rosa (2020) ivestigated the difficulties in listening comprehension that mostly faced by student at English language and literature department. The population of their research was the second year English Department students of Universitas Nigeri, Padang. They used
descriptive qualitative research which consists of questionnaire and interview.
According to S Y Rajab and V Nimehchisalem (2016), among 12 questions related to process problems, mostly, it was challenging for students to focus on the text, they easily lost their concentrations. Students had difficulty guessing the meaning of unknown words by linking them to known words. Similar result can be seen the investigation of L Diora and R N Rosa (2020) in which understanding every single word in speech is the second difficulty among students after difficulties associating with complex grammar structures. When they came across an unknown word, they could not stop and think about it because if they do this, they will miss next upcoming words.
When it comes to problems related to the listener, S. Y. Rajab and V. Nimehchisalem (2016) conducted that remembering the meaning of a long listening text and some words with unfamiliar sounds were major problems. The second section of questionnaire by L. Diora and R. N. Rosa (2020) also contained questions about students' difficulties related to listener. The first difficulty related to their selves as a listener is anxiety. To decrease anxiety and increase interest among students to the topic, the lecturer should create a fun classroom environment. Third difficulty is unable to concentrate to the listening. The reasons may be noises which could come from outside or inside the classroom. Forth difficulty is unclear pronunciation. Most speakers have different ways in pronouncing words because they have different accents or dialects. The fifth difficulty is to remember information. It means that they easily forgot what they have just heard.
In the last section questionnaire by L. Diora and R. N. Rosa (2020) questions about students' difficulties related to the speaker and physical setting were asked. The first difficulty is poor quality of tapes and disks which will produce unclear sounds and students cannot hear it clearly. So, the lecturer should pay attention to equipments like sounds system, headphone, microphone which are used during listening process. To cope with difficulties in listening comprehension, students use a number of methods like cognitive, affective, meta-cognitive, psychomotor-based strategies. Researchers conducted investigations to analyze the effects of these strategies and the level of preference among English learners.
Cognitive strategies include intellectual knowledge associated with learn process. M. Canpolat, S. Kuzu, B. Yildirim, S. Canpolat (2015) investigated active listening skills that are used in classroom by academically successful students. The participants of their study are eight academically successful students in several undergraduate programs within Faculty of Education at Mustafa Kemal University. Four participants are women and four were men. Content analysis of the research was conducted by observations and interviews.
According to date analysis, participating students tend to use cognitive strategies
like paying attention, taking notes, making associations and analogies, seeking the main idea of the listening, asking questions if they do not understand, and having clear objectives.
Among these cognitive listening strategies, paying attention and taking notes were mostly preferred by the students. The strategy of taking notes was regarded as more effective and more permanent learning style. According to the answers of participants, students can develop taking notes by accommodating with their instructor's emphasis upon certain points. Ch Xiao and G.K Sidhu (2018) conducted the research about a deep understanding of listening strategies used by 360 EFL undergraduate students studying in an IHL located in Henan, China. They investigated their research through interviews and questionnaires. According to the result, transferring and translation were mostly employed by students among cognitive strategies. Chinese EFL learners tend to translate the words and sentences that they hear to Chinese when they do not comprehend. It shows that students L1 knowledge is necessary in the processing of L2 listening comprehension.
In order to be effective students should address the affective properties like emotions that they experience while listening. According to the data gathered by M. Canpolat, S. Kuzu, B. Yildirim, S. Canpolat (2015), students informed about effective behaviors such as coming to the lesson on time, being motivated, enjoying the lesson, being calm and others. According to students' answers, attending the class on time allows students to prepare prior to listening, not to miss the beginning of the lesson and to concentrate better on the lecture. Ch Xiao and G.K Sidhu (2018) investigated that socio-effective strategies allow learners to comprehend the listening text by asking questions, cooperating with peers and lowering anxiety. The most used effective strategy by Chinese learners is lowering anxiety and encouraging themselves. They reported that they used the limited rate of cooperative strategies because of having mass lectures where they have limited activities for cooperative learning.
Meta-cognitive strategies includes regulation over learning process like monitoring, planning, concentrating. M. Rahimrad and M.R Moini (2015) investigated the difficulties of students in academic lectures and the effects of meta-cognitive strategies listening comprehension during lectures. 15 female participants who were instructors and technicians at the University of Qom, Iran. They were randomly divided into an experimental (8) and control (7) group to identify the impact of meta-cognitive strategies in listening comprehension. Academic listening sample of the British IELTS were utilized before and after eight sessions to analyze listening performance of participants who were in both experimental and control groups.
Taking into account participants' age and profession, sixteen academic lectures
were selected from different oral passages form academic context to both control and treatment groups.
But, treatment group was taught meta-cognitive strategy instructions. Before teaching meta-cognitive strategies to consider their comprehension of academic lectures, tests results of both groups were rather similar. After learning meta-cognitive strategies, treatment group significantly improved listening comprehension. According to the results of interview, majority of English learners informed that they had difficulty in listening academic lectures owing to lack of general listening skills. After the posttest, learners in the experimental group activated planning and directed attention methods. The learners stated that they found directed attention was very useful which helped them not to give up or stop listening during the lecture even if they had comprehension problems. Evaluation and monitoring were most frequently utilized by learners. According to investigation by Ch Xiao and G.K Sidhu (2018), evaluation and problem identification were not frequently used by Chinese learners. It was also hard for them to monitor themselves during listening.
Psychomotor-based strategies are applying a wide variety of physical activities such as movement, eye-contact and others. M. Canpolat, S. Kuzu, B. Yildirim, S. Canpolat (2015), also investigated psychomotor- based strategies of effective learners. According to interview, they indicated utilizing psycho-based behaviors like being close to the blackboard, making eye contact, following along the lecturer both their head and eyes, getting feedback, sitting up straight, paying attention to the gesture, facial expressions, tone of voice and stresses of the speakers. Eye contact can be seen main communication tool between the speaker and listeners. Sitting close the blackboard was one of the most common used strategy in which learners were close the instructor and noise could not stop them listening.
This article paper brings together investigations' results in the area of difficulties and strategies among EFL learners. Rahimrad, M and Moini, M.R (2015) conducted their research only women to identify the effectiveness of meta-cognitive strategy. Investigating both men and women and analyzing gender differences among them can be further development of their study.
References:
1.Canpolat, M., Kuzu, S., Yildirim, B.,& Canpolat, S. (2015). Active listening strategies of academically successful university students. Eurasian Journal of Educational Research, 60,163-180.
2.Diora,L and Rosa, R.N (2020). An analysis of students difficulties in listening comprehension: A descriptive study at English language and literature department. Journal of English Language Teaching Volume 9, 88-98.
3. Rahimrad, M and Moini, M.R (2015) The Challenges of Listening to
Academic Lectures for EAP Learners and the Impact of Metacognition on Academic Lecture Listening Comprehension. SAGE Open, 1-9.
4. Rajab, S, Y & Nimehchisalem, V (2016). Listening Comprehension Problems and Strategies among Kurdish EFL Learners. The Iranian EFL Journal, Volume 12 Issue 4, 6-2
5.Xiao, Ch and Sidhu, G.K (2018). Listening comprehension strategies employed by EFL tertiary students in China: A case study. The Turkish Online Journal of Design, Art and Communication,1270-1276.
