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85SCIENTIFIC PROGRESS VOLUME 2 I ISSUE 2 I 2021
ISSN: 2181-1601
PROBLEMS WITH LISTENING COMPREHENSION IN ENGLISH
Maftuna Xazratkulovna Islomova
Samarkand State University, Russian Faculty English Languages Department, Teacher
of English Languages
ABSTRACT
Listening is one of the most important skills in English language learning. When students listen to English language, they face a lot of listening difficulties. Students have critical difficulties in listening comprehension because universities and schools pay more attention to writing, reading, and vocabulary. Listening is not an important part of many course books and most teachers do not pay attention to this important skill in their classes. In this paper, the researchers reviewed the terms listening, listening comprehension, listening comprehension strategies, and listening difficulties. The review of literature indicated that when teachers are aware of students' learning difficulties they can help them develop effective listening strategies and finally solve their difficulties in listening and improve their listening comprehension abilities.
Keywords: listening, listening comprehension, strategies, difficulties.
The biggest problem with listening comprehension is that listeners are not able to control how quickly speakers talk. Second, listeners cannot have words repeated and this can cause critical difficulties for them. Students cannot replay a recording section.Listening has been defined by many researchers. Chastain (1971) defined listening as the ability to understand native speech at normal speed. Morley (1972) said listening involves auditory discrimination, aural grammar, selecting necessary information, remembering it, and connecting it to the process between sound and form of meaning. According to Postovsky (1975), listening differs in meaning from sound discrimination to aural comprehension. Goss (1982) defined listening as a process of understanding what is heard and organizing it into lexical elements to which meaning can be allocated. Bowen, Madsen, and Hilferty (1985) demonstrated that listening is understanding the oral language. Students hear oral speech, divide sounds, classify them into lexical and syntactic units, and comprehend the message. Listening is a process of receiving what the speaker says, making and showing meaning, negotiating meaning with the speaker and answering, and creating meaning by participation, creativity, and empathy. According to Purdy (1997), listening is the process of receiving, making meaning from, and answering to spoken and/or nonverbal messages. Rost (2002) defined listening as a complex process of interpretation in which listeners match what they hear with what they already know. According to Rost (2009), listening helps us to understand the world around us and is one of the necessary elements in creating
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VOLUME 2 I ISSUE 2 I 2021 ISSN: 2181-1601
successful communication. Jafari and Hashim (2015) emphasized that listening is a channel for comprehensible input and more than 50 percent of the time learners spend in learning a foreign language is devoted to listening.
When students listen to English language, they face a lot of listening difficulties. students critical difficulties in listening comprehension because universities and schools pay more attention to writing, reading, and vocabulary. in this paper, the researchers reviewed the terms listening, listening comprehension, listening comprehension strategies, and listening difficulties. For some lecturers learning foreign language mean the ability of speaking the target language. In some aspects it is true but still argumentative. Student's main factor of speaking ability is charging with listening as much as possible. There a lot of definitions of listening. According to Chastain (1971) the aim of listening comprehension is understand the native conversation at normal rate in a spontaneous condition. Cognitive strategies are related to understanding and gathering input in short term memory or long-term memory for later use. Comprehension begins with the received data that is examined as consecutive levels of formation and a process of decoding. Cognitive strategy is a problem-solving method that learners apply to deal with the learning activity and facilitate the learning of knowledge (Azmi Bingol, Celik, Yidliz, & Tugrul Mart, 2014). Derry and Murphy
(1986) defined cognitive strategies as problem-solving techniques that learners use for the acquisition of knowledge or skill. Brown and Palincsar (1982) and O'Malley and Chamot (1990) and Abdalhamid (2012) expressed that cognitive strategies are related to the learning activities and include direct utilization or change of the learning materials. According to Goh (1998), learners utilize cognitive strategies to assist them process, keep, and remember new information. According to Baker and Brown (1984) and Abdalhamid (2012), there are two kinds of metacognitive skill: knowledge of cognition and regulation of cognition. Knowledge of cognition deals with the learners' consciousness of what is going on, and regulation of cognition deals with what learners should do to listen effectively. Bacon (1992), O'Malley and Chamot (1990), Goh (2000), Vandergrift (2003), and Abdalhamid (2012) indicated that the difference between skilled and less skilled listeners can be understood through their application of metacognitive strategies. O'Malley et al. (1989) demonstrated that skilled listeners utilize more repair strategies to redirect their attention back to the activity when there is a comprehension failure, while less skilled listeners cease listening. Vandergrift (2003) and Abdalhamid (2012) showed that skilled listeners applied twice as many metacognitive strategies as their less-skilled learners. According to Henner Stanchina
(1987), metacognitive strategies played an important role in listening comprehension. She mentioned that skilled listeners can permanently explain and what they hear through (1) utilizing their prior knowledge and predictions to create theories on the text; (2) connecting new information with their continuing predictions; (3) making
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ISSN: 2181-1601
deductions to fill comprehension breaks; (4) assessing their predictions; (5) improving their theories. Henner Stanchina (1987) continued skilled listeners can identify failure in understanding and activate their background knowledge to get better comprehension.
REFERENCES
1. Carroll, J. B. (1977). On learning from being told In M. C. Wittrock (Ed.), Learning and instruction (2nd ed., pp. 496-512).
2. Cambridge; Berkeley, CA: McCutchan. Chastain, K. (1971). The Development of Modern Language Skills: Theory to Practice,
3. Conrad, L. (1989). The effects of time-compressed speech on listening comprehension Studies in second language Acquisition,
4. Ferris, D. (1998). Students' views of academic aural/oral skills: A comparative needs analysis. TESOL Quarterly, 32, 289-318.
5. Goh, C. (2000). A cognitive perspective on language learners' listening comprehension problems. System, 2855-75.
