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This study aims to clarify the reasons English language students are weak in listening comprehension skills in identifying listening and listening comprehension terms, reviewing and posing listening comprehension problems, then surveyed students at Hutech Institute of International Education, Ho Chi Minh City University of Technology- HUTECH. Finally, the survey concludes with the most prominent issues affecting Listening Comprehension in their listening exam.
THE REASONS THAT ENGLISH LANGUAGE STUDENTS ARE WEAK IN LISTENING COMPREHENSION SKILLS Nguyễn Thị Minh Tâm, Nguyễn Tường Ví, Nguyễn Duy Khánh, Lê Sĩ Ngọc Hiền HUTECH Institute of International Education, HUTECH University, Vietnam Instructor: MA Nguyễn Vũ Thanh Phương Abstract There are some concerns about the background knowledge of English language students, especially about their listening comprehension skills (Bakhtiarvand & Adinevand, 2011) Studies show that today’s students are facing many difficulties in listening comprehension and it affects their listening skill test (Chau, 2018) This study aims to clarify the reasons English language students are weak in listening comprehension skills in identifying listening and listening comprehension terms, reviewing and posing listening comprehension problems, then surveyed students at Hutech Institute of International Education, Ho Chi Minh City University of Technology- HUTECH Finally, the survey concludes with the most prominent issues affecting Listening Comprehension in their listening exam Keywords: problems, factors, listening comprehension, listening skill, listening exam, English major, HUTECH Introduction The English language includes listening, speaking, reading and writing skills For students majoring in the English language, mastery of all four skills is essential According to a number of reports and studies, currently, listening comprehension skills are considered as prerequisite skills for the remaining three skills (Reiss et al., 1983) In a similar position, Gilakjani claims that English listening comprehension is a necessary skill for college students However, this competence is considered quite difficult for linguistic learners According to the survey, plenty of linguistic students from freshman to third-year at Institute of International Education, Ho Chi Minh City University of Technology- HUTECH have significant problems and barriers to English listening comprehension This affects the ability to acquire knowledge from specialized subjects Our research is aimed at understanding and determining the causes of students' weak listening comprehension skill, therefore, some solutions for the above causes The identified causes that negatively affect the listening comprehension of language learners are analyzed based on theoretical bases In this article, important issues related to the listening comprehension ability of HUTECH Institute of International Education students will be considered Based on the available theories and methods, this study 1531 identifies the terms listening and listening comprehension, explains the problem components of the listening comprehension process based on the survey's parameters, thus, in the last it gives conclusions about listening comprehension in listening exams for HUTECH students Theoretical framework Listening According to research papers by Pourhosein Gilakjani & Sabouri in 2016 and Rost in 2009, listening is a series of positive mental activities including auditory discrimination, sound grammar, selection of essential information, memorization and connection it with the process between sound and form of meaning Listening Comprehension There are various reports and documents that define the term "Comprehension" According to Nadig (2013) "listening comprehension" includes distinguishing speech sounds, understanding the meaning of each word, and understanding the syntax of sentences Hamouda (2013) states that this is a matter of understanding what the listener has heard and their ability to repeat the text despite the fact that the listener can repeat the sound without actually listening comprehension Listening Comprehension Problems Psychology Underwood (1989) said that there are some causes of obstruction to effective listening comprehension First, the listeners lack control of the speed of a speaker Underwood claimed, "many English language learners believe that the greatest difficulty with listening comprehension is that the listener cannot control how quickly a speaker speaks" Second, the listener may fail to recognize the pronunciation According to Lund (1991, p 201) “listening comprehension exists in time, rather than space – it is ephemeral in nature” and that “the sound system of the second language poses a significant problem” English learners can face a difference between sound and spell, which is a difference between the spoken and written form of words (Osada, N,2004) Third, listeners not have enough vocabulary; according to Osada (2004) said, “listeners who not know all the vocabulary used by the speaker, listening can be very stressful as they usually start thinking about the meaning and as a result of this they miss the following information” Fourth, the listeners are not familiar with the contextual and background knowledge of the speaker’s experience such as indigenous speech or technical terms In particular, if the listeners only understand the surface meaning of the context, it may be difficult to comprehend the whole meaning of the message (Underwood, 1989; Ur, P.,1984) Environment and physical 1532 Besides the effects coming from psychology and physics, the listening skill is also influenced by environmental life, which contains both elements above In the research named “Influence of Environments on the English Learning of Students in India”, Dr Shruti Agarwal and Ram Krishan Thakur (2014) pointed out that environment is a complex concept that is able to affect the external of humans, and from thence it performs the thinking internallIn this study, we use environmental factors such as noise, external influences, and school education as problems that make HUTECH language students weak in listening Last researches Based on all theories from the latest research relating to listening comprehension, the conclusion is that many different factors influence listening comprehension Although there were various methodology studies, Nadig (2013) and Hamouda (2013) concluded that notwithstanding what the reasons are, the listening ability is dominated by both internal and external Usually, the problem, starting with the interior, commonly relates to the psychology of learners, and the studies of (Underwood, 1989), Lund (1991), Osada, N (2004) have proved this On the other hand, the study of Dr Shruti Agarwal and Ram Krishan Thakur (2014) mentioned that the impact of the environment, which regards the external factor, also be able to dominate and limit the listening comprehension of learners Our research was performed based on available theories to find the reasons and contribute to the method, which helps to improve the listening skill of non-EFL learners Methodology a Research Setting and Participants This scientific article is limited to English language students studying at the Institute of International Education, Ho Chi Minh City University of Technology- HUTECH There were 44 students, who had been learners of the English curriculum at HUTECH University and had received English knowledge since grade three, participating in this research There are 25 junior students (56,8%), sophomores (20,5%) and 10 first-year students b Instruments This study used a closed-ended questionnaire, online and offline survey equipment Both types of survey have the same content questionnaire, which 10 items are used to detect students' listening comprehension problems in the Listening exam Participants will rate these 10 hypothetical causes on levels of influence, respectively, 0% (Never), 25% (Rarely), 50% (Occasionally), 75% (Usually) and 100% (Always) c Data Collection and Analysis Before conducting data collection, it informed the respondents about the purpose and meaning of the research paper, then they were explained by our research team on how to fill out the survey questionnaire For those 1533 who took the paper survey (offline), they completed the survey in about 10 minutes and returned the answer sheet For sophomores and freshmen surveyed on Google Forms, they returned impact results in minutes The questionnaires for both methods were similar, descriptive statistics, including frequencies (F) and percentages (%) The data collected through the survey will be manually entered and calculated by Excel, then the data table is fed into the WPS application to be exported into the bar chart below In addition, of the online survey respondents commented on other problems they encountered in the Listening exam d Questionnaire and result Table 1: Questionnaire results on the influence of listening comprehension problems Table 2: Bar charts describe the parameters of the impact of listening comprehension problems 1534 The bar chart, which is based on survey data, describes the frequency of problems in the Listening Comprehension of 44 HUTECH students In general, they assumed most problems to be occasional In the bar chart, many participants admitted that they sometimes could not recognize all sounds in the listening passage However, the number of people who acknowledge the rarity of this problem is also quite high In Question 2, no one said that the problem of fast speech never happened to them, so this problem happens and affects them a lot with 25 people saying it happens occasionally Meanwhile, online surveys are rare and never have these problems In Question 5, external influences sometimes distracted the number of people who admitted that peaked at 63.64% or 28 people The reason for weak listening is that of the educational program they go through 38.64% of people think it affects them sometimes The rating levels of those surveyed are also not quite 50% biased, like the previous ones The number of people who think that noise from outside factors always 100% affects their listening comprehension in the Listening exam reaches 25% To answer this question, a few online surveyors commented they were really dissatisfied with the noise and expressed their wish to the research team that the school should improve the audio transmission Instead of using speakers in the Listening exam, the school should invest in headphones for candidates Conclusion Based on survey data, issues 3, 5, and are believed to affect most and most frequently most OUM students when they take the Listening exam First, they have problems in thinking critically and analyzing information that leads them to miss the next piece of information (“Chapter 7: Critical Thinking and Evaluating Information | EDUC 1300: Effective Learning Strategies”, n.d.) Second, extraneous factors sometimes distract them Third, noise was found to have the most profound effect on their listening comprehension progress (Yang et al., 2017) Finally, there is a problem with the content of the listening test, which is said to have too many specialized words, slang words, and local words Something still limited this study for several reasons First, the size of the paper is still not detailed enough because of the limitations of time, funding and the experience of the research team Second, the research team could not access many sources of theories about EFL Students Third, the research survey tools used by the group are not very accurate and not enough to serve this topic Finally, suggestions for improving the listening comprehension of OUM and HUTECH students have not been mentioned In the future, it is appropriate to say that it should explore this problem in more detail ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The team would like to give special thanks to the Instructor and the participants of this survey This study and the figures would not be complete without their wonderful help We sincerely thank you! REFERENCES 1535 Agarwal, S., & Thakur, R K (2014) Influence of environments on the english learning of students in India International Journal on Arts, Management and Humanities, 3(1), 5-8 Bakhtiarvand, M., & Adinevand, S (2011) RETRACTED: Is Listening Comprehension Influenced by the Cultural Knowledge of the Learners? A Case Study of Iranian EFL Pre-intermediate Learners RELC Journal, 42(2), 111-124 https://doi.org/10.1177/0033688211401257 Chapter 7: Critical Thinking and Evaluating Information | EDUC 1300: Effective Learning Strategies Courses.lumenlearning.com Retrieved 20 May 2022, from https://courses.lumenlearning.com/austincclearningframeworks/chapter/chapter-7-critical-thinking-and-evaluating-information/ Chen, X (2020) Psychological Process of English Learners in Listening Comprehension Revista Argentina de Clínica Psicológica, 29(2), 710 Gilakjani, A P (2016) The significance of listening comprehension in English language teaching Theory and Practice in Language Studies, 6(8), 1670 Hamouda, A (2013) An investigation of listening comprehension problems encountered by Saudi students in the EL classroom International Journal Of Academic Research in Progressive Education and Development, 2(2), 113-155 Châu, H (2018) TÁC ĐỘNG CỦA VIỆC GIẢNG DẠY CÁC CHIẾN THUẬT NGHE HIỂU TIẾNG ANH ĐẾN SINH VIÊN NĂM NHẤT CHUYÊN NGÀNH NGÔN NGỮ ANH VÀ QUÁ TRÌNH HỌC KỸ NĂNG NGHE CỦA HỌ Tạp Chí Khoa Học Đại Học Đà Lạt, 8(4), 116 https://doi.org/10.37569/dalatuniversity.8.4.465(2018) Lund, R J (1991) A comparison of second language listening and reading comprehension The modern language journal, 75(2), 196-204 Nadig, A (2013) Listening Comprehension Encyclopedia of autism spectrum disorders, 1743-1743 10 Reiss, M., Rubin, J., & Thompson, I (1983) How to be a More Successful Language Learner The Modern Language Journal, 67(3), 278 https://doi.org/10.2307/327091 11 Rost, M (1994) Introducing Listening London: Penguin books 12 Ur, P (1984) Teaching listening comprehension Cambridge University Press 13 Wang, S (2015) An Empirical Study on the Role of Vocabulary Knowledge in EFL Listening Comprehension Theory And Practice https://doi.org/10.17507/tpls.0505.14 1536 In Language Studies, 5(5), 989 ... listening comprehension in listening exams for HUTECH students Theoretical framework Listening According to research papers by Pourhosein Gilakjani & Sabouri in 2016 and Rost in 2009, listening. .. There are various reports and documents that define the term "Comprehension" According to Nadig (2013) "listening comprehension" includes distinguishing speech sounds, understanding the meaning...identifies the terms listening and listening comprehension, explains the problem components of the listening comprehension process based on the survey''s parameters, thus, in the last it gives