An Investigation Of Students’ Listening Comprehension Problems: The Case Of Grade Twelve At Ginchi Preparatory School

Abstract

In this study an attempt was made to explore the teaching of the listening skills which aims to identify students' listening comprehension problems at Ginchi Preparatory School in EFL classes. Moreover, it examines whether EFL teachers teach listening skills properly and provide students with appropriate listening tasks. In this case, the participants of the study were 92 grade twelve students and four EFL teachers of Ginchi Preparatory School. The instruments used in the study to gather data were observation, questionnaire and semi-structured interview. In this study, the researcher used research design and methodology to gather data appropriately. In this case, the obtained data through the above tools were analyzed and interpreted accordingly. Therefore, the study found out the following major factors that influenced students' listening comprehension. These are students' factor, teachers' factor, listening texts factor, failure to concentrate, physical setting and so on. As far as the student factors are concerned, the finding of the study revealed that listening comprehension was influenced by the students’ lack of interest to learn listening and their poor background in learning listening. Teachers’ lack of motivation to teach listening and their in-adequate qualification in teaching English in general and listening in particular were also other factors that influenced learners' listening comprehension in this school. In addition to this, the speed of the speaker, pronunciation and speaking style were also the major barriers of the speaker. Regarding on the listening texts factors, the study exposed that the difficulty of the listening texts for implementation, complexity of the texts and lack of listening materials were the factors that influenced students' listening comprehension. Furthermore, as far as concentration was concerned while listening activities, students lose focus which resulted from the length of the listening texts, poor quality of the speakers' sound, interest and so on. Finally, the study recommends that students should learn listening starting from lower grade and they should be exposed to classroom listening practices. In addition, they ought to be engaged in listening activities outside the classroom to make them familiar with listening activities.