The Study of English Listening Difficulties

• Main Authors: Wu, Yu-Ju, 吳昱儒
• Other Authors: Huang, Yuan-He
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2015
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/96500827349674464381

碩士 === 明道大學 === 課程與教學研究所 === 103 === ABSTRACT English learning has been an important part of language learning in Taiwan. With the trend of the educational policy, English listening proficiency has been emphasized to encourage students to increase their listening ability. However, as the second language learner, students still have the listening difficulties and limitation because listening ability contain many factors interweaved. Thus, the aim of the study is to investigate the listening difficulties among students in senior high school and vocational high school when they listen to English materials. The subjects are 300 students of senior and vocational high school students in Changhua County. The research method adopts the quantitative research approach of the empirical study and uses the Listening Comprehension Questionnaire, including two parts. First part includes genders, school types and the ways of practicing English listening. The Second part comprises five domains (listeners, the text, speakers, task characteristics and the listening process). The study takes school types (the senior high school group and the vocational high school group) as the independent variable. Ways of practicing English listening and five factor domains as dependent variables to investigate how they practice their English listening in their daily life and investigate their English listening difficulties. After data collected, the study discusses the difference between two school types on five domains. The findings show that, for both groups, their most frequent ways of practicing English listening is to listen to their English teacher reading vocabulary, sentences and texts. Five factors in listening difficulties for the senior high group are ranked as the following, 1) Texts, 2) Listeners, 3) Tasks, 4)Speakers, 5)Listening Process while for the vocational high group, 1)Texts, 2)Listeners, 3)Speakers, 4)Tasks, 5)Listening Process. The results show that both two groups share the text factor in listening difficulties. Therefore, the researcher adopted the method of Pearson’s product-moment correlation to find out the relevance between the ways of listening and the text factor. At the end of the study, students’ learning was advised to be activated instead of being trained to listen to the listening comprehension test and teachers should try to provide the authentic environment for them to learn, with sound listening strategies. Keywords:Senior and Vocational High School, Listening Comprehension, Ways of English Listening, Listening Difficulties