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Some Academic Listening Problems Facing Second-Year English Major Students

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Introduction Listening plays a vital role in daily life. People listen for different purposes like communication, information, academic purposes, entertainment …In addition, without listening skill, no communication can be achieved. However, according to some previous researches, such as Rixon’ one (1993), those who learn English as a foreign language, especially in a non-native setting, find it difficult to acquire good listening skill. The listening problems involved hearing the sounds, understanding intonation and stress, coping with redundancy and noise, predicting, comprehending colloquial vocabulary, fatigue, understanding different accents, using visual and aural environmental clues (Ur, !990). To investigate thoroughly this …show more content…

The result from table 1 demonstrated that 94% of the students (47) experienced this kind of problem whereas only 6% of participants (3) reported that different accents were not their trouble. From this data, it can be seen that second-year English major students seemed to be not capable of understanding various accents. This finding is in accordance with what Ur (1990) has found out. According to Ur, “many foreign-language learners who are used to be the accent of their own teacher are surprised and dismayed when they find they have difficulty understanding someone else” (p.20). III. Some reasons explaining the problems of second-year English major students As shown before from column chart 1, listening is actually an obstacle to students. In fact, to get good listening skill, it takes much time and efforts. However, many students seem to spend little time practicing at home. The data shows that second-year English major students’ level of listening depends on the frequency of studying listening. Of 3 respondents who were good at listening, all of them answered that they always studied listening. On the contrary, of 47 students admitted to be at fair or poor level, 9 ones rarely studied listening and even among 32 people who said that they sometimes learned, 9 was still weak at this subject. This number indicates that the infrequency of studying can be one of the reasons that cause sophomores difficulties in listening. From table 3, it is

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