Of the four basic skills of the English language, reading, writing, speaking and listening, the most difficult to acquire is listening comprehension. It is also the only skill that cannot be “taught”.
In the assessments that EFL students from English and foreign language colleges are required to take at least three times per semester, the area that is most critical and in which they experience the greatest difficulty is listening comprehension.
What makes listening difficult?
There are four groups of factors that can affect the difficulty of language listening tasks. Here’s what they are and how they affect listening comprehension skills.
A speaker
or How many are there?
Does one person speak at a time? Are there multiple speakers? Are any of them talking at the same time?
o How fast they speak
Does the pace of the speaker allow enough “time” for the listener to mentally process the speech? Does the speaker’s language flow at a faster or slower pace than the listener is used to?
o What types of accents do they have?
Does the speaker (or speakers) have an unknown accent or a way of speaking that is less understandable to the listener? Is the listener used to variable accents and types of speech?
The listener
o The role of the listener
What is the listener’s purpose in listening? General understanding? Specific information? Pleasure? Business? Critical data extraction?
o The level of response required
What does the listener have to do in response to the speech? Act? Answer? To think? Enjoy? Any?
o Interest in the content or topic
Is the listener engaged in the content or topic? Is it something they want, need or need to know?
The content
grammar
Are the grammar and structure in use familiar to the listener? Can the listener use or assimilate the grammatical structure used in this context?
or vocabulary
Is vocabulary or lexicon new to the listener used in the speech? Is the number of new words substantial? Noted linguistics author Scott Thornbury says, “Count 100 words in a passage. If more than 10 of the words are unknown, the text has a vocabulary recognition rate of less than 90%. It is therefore unreadable.” The same is true for a listening comprehension passage.
o Information structure
Is the information or material presented in the speech clear and understandable to the listener? Is the order of presentation logical, progressive, does it have redundancies or is it presented non-sequentially?
o Previous knowledge assumed
In discourse comprehension, is prior knowledge required? Is any substantial prior knowledge, highly specialized or technical in nature required?
SUPPORT FOR
What kind of support, if any, is available? Support in this context refers to whether there are pictures, diagrams, or other visual aids to support the text.
While there are a number of approaches that can be used to improve listening comprehension, one important key is regular and consistent practice. An EFL or ESL teacher can also provide a measure of guided practice in developing key listening comprehension skills. Taking these other factors into account, listening comprehension segments can be identified that may cause problems for students or that have a sufficient number of appropriate aspects to make them practical and usable.