FACTORS INHIBITING STUDENTS’ LISTENING COMPREHENSION IN AN UNDERGRADUATE ENGLISH STUDIES PROGRAM

English

Recently, English has played a vital role in many fields in Vietnam and in the whole world. Therefore, having a good level of English is a favourable condition for many learners to study and work in other countries. Among English skills, listening skill has been a problematic skill, particularly in a foreign language context. The purpose of this study was to determine the factors inhibiting listening comprehension of English Studies students. The study was designed as a descriptive study by using the appropriate data collection tool, which is a quantitative method with a Likert-type questionnaire with five levels. The questionnaire was administered by 80 seniors and juniors majoring in English Studies High-quality program from the Faculty of Foreign Languages at Can Tho university to collect research data on factors affecting listening comprehension. Then, the statistics package for the social science program was used to analyze the obtained data. The results showed that these factors were divided into five main groups: speakers, listeners, listening process, listening tasks and quality of listening equipment and environment. This study also revealed some differences related to difficulties between seniors and juniors, such as memorization ability, listening to the main idea, sound conditioning. The results discussed would help students as well as teachers have more insight into the difficulties that students are unlikely to encounter while studying and taking the listening test. Simultaneously, appropriate strategies and recommendations would be also mentioned for both teachers and students in teaching and learning to improve the effects caused by objective and subjective factors on listening comprehension.

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