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976 © 2011 ACADEMY PUBLISHER JOURNAL OF LANGUAGE TEACHING AND RESEARCH [24] Morely, J. (1991). The pronunciation component in teaching English to speakers of other languages. TESOL Quarterly 25.1, 51–74. [25] Morely, J. (1994). A multidimensional curriculum for speech-pronunciation instruction. In J. Morely (ed.), Pronunciation pedagogy and theory: New views, new directions. Virginia: TESOL Inc., 66–91. [26] Murakawa, H. (1981). Teaching English pronunciation to Japanese adults. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Texas, Austin. [27] Murphy, J. (2003). Pronunciation. In D. Nunan (ed.), Practical English language teaching. Boston: McGraw-Hill, 111–128. [28] Neufeld, G. G. (1987). On the acquisition of prosodic and articulatory features in adult Language learning. In G. Ioup & S. Weinberger (eds.), Interlanguage phonology: The acquisition of a second language sound system. Cambridge, MA: Newbury House Publishers, 321–332. [29] Pennington, M. & Richards, J. (1986). Pronunciation revisited. TESOL Quarterly 20.2, 207–226. [30] Richards, J. C. (2005). Intro (3rd edn.). Cambridge: CUP. [31] Schmitt, N. (2002). An introduction to applied linguistics. London: Oxford University Press. [32] Setter, J. & Jenkins, J. (2005). Pronunciation. Language Teaching 38.1, 1–17. [33] Verhoeven, L. (1994). Transfer in bilingual development: The linguistic interdependence hypothesis revisited. Language Learning 44, 381–384. Mahmood Hashemian is an assistant professor at Shahrekord University. His area of research includes cognitive-semantic linguistics, sociolinguistics, and applied linguistics. He has published articles in academic journals such as IJAL, IJLS, JALS, Linguistik-Online, JLTR, TPLS, Iranian EFL Journal, and International Journal of Social Sciences. Also, he has given lectures in conferences such as TELLSI (4, 7, & 8), LDP2010, and ELT in the Islamic World. Batool Fadaei got her B.A. in English Translation from Shahrekord University and is now an M.A. TEFL student at the same university. Her areas of interest include psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, and cognitive linguistics. And, she has been teaching English at various language institutes for more than three years.
ISSN 1798-4769 Journal of Language Teaching and Research, Vol. 2, No. 5, pp. 977-988, September 2011 © 2011 ACADEMY PUBLISHER Manufactured in Finland. doi:10.4304/jltr.2.5.977-988 A Study of Factors Affecting EFL Learners' English Listening Comprehension and the Strategies for Improvement © 2011 ACADEMY PUBLISHER Abbas Pourhossein Gilakjani School of Educational Studies, Universiti Sains Malaysia, Malaysia Email: abbas.pouhossein@yahoo.com Mohammad Reza Ahmadi School of Educational Studies, Universiti Sains Malaysia, Malaysia Email: mr.ahmadi2720@yahoo.com Abstract—Listening plays a significant role in daily communication and educational process. In spite of its importance, listening has long been the neglected skill in second language acquisition, research, teaching, and assessment. However, in recent years there has been an increased focus on L2 listening ability because of its perceived importance in language learning and teaching. The study tries to find the factors influencing English listening comprehension and the strategies to be taken that might improve students’ listening comprehension. The paper focuses on four main issues. First, it discusses the definition of listening, significance of listening. Second, it reviews the process of listening comprehension, strategies of listening comprehension. Third, analysis of listening comprehension problems is reviewed. Fourth, teaching methods for listening comprehension will be discussed. Fifth, researchers review teaching listening activities. Sixth, general principles in teaching listening comprehension are discussed. Findings based on the review of the literature along with analysis of the data are of great significance and can be advantageous to improve EFL learners' English listening comprehension skill. Index Terms—listening comprehension, importance, process, strategies, problems, methods, principles I. INTRODUCTION Listening plays an important role in communication as it is said that, of the total time spent on communicating, listening takes up 40-50%; speaking, 25-30%; reading, 11-16%; and writing, about 9% (Mendelsohn, 1994). Although the teaching of listening comprehension has long been ―somewhat neglected and poorly taught aspect of English in many EFL programs‖ (Mendelsohn, 1994, p. 9), listening is now regarded as much more important in both EFL classrooms and SLA research. Listening involves an active process of deciphering and constructing meaning from both verbal and non-verbal messages (Nunan, 1998). Thus, the label of passive skill applied to listening is a misnomer. This misunderstanding may stem from the fact that superficially learners seem to only sit in a language lab quietly, listen to pre-recorded dialogues, and write the answers to some questions related to the oral stimulus. It is evident, then, that listening is not as ‗passive‘ as it has been claimed to be as it demands a number of complicated processes on the part of the learners. There are two subsuming cognitive processes: bottom-up (data-driven) and top-down (conceptually-driven). The bottom-up processing involves constructing meaning from the smallest unit of the spoken language to the largest one in a linear mode (Nunan, 1998). Thus, the learners attempt to understand a spoken discourse by decoding a number of sounds to form words. Next, a nexus of words are linked to form phrases, which make up sentences. These sentences build a complete text, the meaning of which is then constructed by the listeners. In addition to the grammatical relationships, such suprasegmental phonemes as stress, rhythm and intonation also substantially contribute to this datadriven processing (van Duzer, 1997). Learners can be trained to perform this processing, for instance, by activities that require them to discriminate two sounds or distinguish rising and falling intonations. The top-down processing, on the other hand, refers to interpreting meaning as intended by the speakers by means of schemata or structures of knowledge in the mind (Nunan, 1998). This view emphasizes the prominence of background knowledge already possessed by the learners in making sense of the information they hear. In the aural perception, the prior knowledge may facilitate their attempt to grasp the incoming information by relating the familiar with the new one, and significant lack of such knowledge can hamper their efforts to comprehend a particular utterance. It is, therefore, essential that learners are accustomed to performing this processing, usually by extracting the gist of the exchange they listen to. Due to the fact that the communicative approach is increasingly used in EFL situation, we, therefore, stress the importance of students‘ communicative competence. The need for competence in listening in EFL English language learners is increasing, so that listening teaching has attracted considerable attention. Unfortunately, the teaching of listening skills is still neglected in the English language teaching process. EFL learners have serious problems in
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The Relationship between Self-effic
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