Though Anderson (1985) does not directly relate listening comprehension difficulties to the discussion of comprehension stage, the three-phase comprehension model, namely, perception, parsing and utilization, is often borrowed by scholars for the categorization of listening comprehension difficulties. One of the pioneers who utilizes Anderson’s (1985) model in the investigation of listening comprehension
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difficulties is Christine Goh (2000). As part of her dissertation project, she conscientiously gathers students’ weekly diaries from 40 Chinese college students who study English in Singapore. Among the 40 students, seventeen of them are invited for small group interviews and twenty-three of them participate in an immediate retrospective verbalization procedure as means to probe into students’ listening comprehension problems. The results of the problems are categorized under perception, parsing and utilization.
In the same vein, Sun and Li (2008) recruit twenty-two English majors from a university in China. They first have the students learn to think aloud. Then, the students have to take an English listening comprehension test with two articles of about five minutes long. The listening test material is predesigned with proper pauses so that the students are able to orally report the difficulties they encounter while listening. The result of the students’ think-aloud protocol is then analyzed with Anderson’s (1985) three-stage comprehension model.
Wang (2008) again employs Anderson’s (1985) cognitive comprehension frame for the categorization of listening comprehension difficulties. One hundred twenty-one freshman and sophomore English majors participate in his study through the English listening comprehension course. Questionnaires and interviews are utilized for the date collection. For the questionnaire part, one open-ended questionnaire is given to the students to ask them to list any comprehension difficulties they face while listening.
The result of the open-ended questionnaire is then gathered and categorized according to Anderson’s (1985) three-phase comprehension model. Then, a closed questionnaire based on the question items from students’ open-ended answers are contrived and given to students. Some of the students are also invited for interviews to further probe their listening comprehension difficulties.
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A group of researchers, also from China, follow the similar model. Chang, Lu, Chang and Ting (2012) compare three groups of students, who are English majors, clinical medicine undergraduates and master students of medicine. Students in the study have to take an English test taken from Part III of the fourth level national English listening test and then answer a questionnaire of listening difficulty. The listening difficulty questionnaire, again, is based on Anderson’s (1985) model.
The diversity among the categorization of listening difficulty in the four study might be due to the difference in the methodology and subjects. The categorization of the listening difficulty in the study is not set a priori. Rather, it is gleaned and later arranged in order with various instruments such as open-ended questionnaires (Wang, 2008), listening diaries (Goh, 2000), self-reports (Goh, 2000), think-aloud protocols (Sun and Li, 2008), and interviews (Goh, 2000; Wang, 2008). Even though the student participants are all college students, they vary in majors and English proficiency. It is plausible that the resulting listening difficulty taken from different groups of students could differ in certain parts and degrees. And the different categorization of some listening difficulty might result from authors’ interpretation of Anderson’s (1985) model. Nonetheless, Anderson’s (1985) three-phase comprehension model still provides later researchers with a referential framework in the categorization of listening comprehension.
Not every scholar stick to Anderson’s (1985) three-phase comprehension model as the base for categorizing listening comprehension. Chang Wu, and Pang (2013) do a thorough analysis on listening comprehension difficulties and propose a thirty-one item questionnaire with six factors. Through tedious examinations of factor analysis and fit indices, a twenty-three-item questionnaires is contrived. The six factors that categorize listening comprehension difficulties are text, input channel and surroundings, relevance,
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listener, speaker, and task. Unknown vocabulary, hard grammatical structures, unfamiliar topics, abstract concepts and long sentences are defined under text factors.
The clearance and loudness of linguistic inputs are considered in input channel and surroundings. Under the relevance factor, it is agreed that listeners find it difficult to concentrate or understand the listening material when the content is irrelevant or of no interests to them. For listener factors, the authors put nervousness, which pertains to situations when listeners forget what they know or cannot follow the aural input, as sources of problems. Sometimes, the presence of an evaluator also increases listeners’
nervousness. As for speaker factors, speakers’ speech rate, loudness, pronunciation, and accents are reported by students to be sources of listening difficulty. Task characteristics refer to types of tasks or tests that the listeners respond to while listening. Whether the test is a multiple-choice test, with or without visual aids could contribute to listening comprehension difficulties.
A similar but not identical categorization is done by Yang (2011) in Taiwan. By scrutinizing students’ listening diaries, she identifies five factors, which are text, listener, listening process, speaker and task factors. Unknown words, fast delivery, difficult grammar, unrepeated material, linking sounds, lengthy sentences, incomprehensible accents, and unfamiliar topics are considered text factors in this study. Listener factors contain limited vocabulary knowledge, little practice in English listening, weak grammar, no concentration, laziness, lack of patience, nervousness, weak memory and inability to read English words. One encounters difficulties in the listening process when one misses next parts because of thinking about previous meanings or its L1 translation. One could also forget what is heard quickly, being distracted at the beginning or unable to discriminate familiar words. For speaker factors, the author puts speech rate, speaker accents and possibility of a native speaker as some sources of
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listening comprehension difficulties. Dictation, note-taking and choosing items are thought to be task factors of listening comprehension difficulties.
Yousif (2006), on the other hand, provides an index of linguistic and conceptual, discourse, acoustic, environmental, and psychological variables as categorizations of listening comprehension difficulties. By distributing questionnaires and interviewing fifty first-year English majors in Arabia, it is assumed that vocabulary, sentence length, recognition of referential systems such as pronouns are linguistic factors and organization and explanation of concepts could be part of conceptual variables.
Discourse variables relate to students’ limited exposure to lengthy speech. Not being able to control the flow of dense information or stop for repetition also annoy them.
Acoustic variables could be the noise from the corridor or other classmates.
Environmental variables concern the climate and insulation of the classroom. Some psychological variables like boredom and frustration also might hinder students’
listening comprehension.
On developing a listening comprehension problem scale, Zhang and Zhang (2011) arranged a four-factor scale, with meaning, attention and memory, words, and sounds as the four main categories of listening comprehension problems. For problems related to meanings, students sometimes cannot understand the intended message of some parts or even the whole text. Sometimes, key ideas of the whole text is also hard to comprehend. Students also cannot understand the next part if they have some earlier problems. Long sentences or words with more than one meaning are put under the meaning category as well. On the attention and memory part, it is said that students tend to forget sentences quickly. They are also inclined to neglect the next part while thinking about previous parts. And they sometimes cannot chunk streams of speech. The third factor, words, is associated with situations when students cannot recognize words they
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have learned due to their own incorrect pronunciations. Or, they might simply cannot respond to the words quickly enough. The fourth factor, sounds, happens when one cannot discriminate sounds because of speakers’ linking, assimilation, omission, fast speech, accent or intonation.
Hamouda (2012) studies 60 English in India. He divides listening difficulty into
“listening materials,” “linguistic features,” “failure to concentrate,” “listener,”
“speaker,” and “physical settings.” Under the “listening materials” category, it is found that students have difficulty pertaining to limited English vocabulary, poor grammar, length of a spoken text, fatigue due to listening to long passage, trying to understand every word, unfamiliar topics, background knowledge, and the difficulty of the material per se. For the “linguistic features,” students find it difficult to listen to colloquial and slang expressions, signal words, unknown words, long and complex sentences as well as engage in inferential process. Students also point out their inability to concentrate when the text is too long for “failure to concentrate.” As for “listener” factor, students are unable to get a general understanding of the spoken text, predict, recognize words they know, whether because they themselves pronounce the words differently or they know the written form but not the aural representation of the words, answer questions, or listen without transcripts. For the “speaker” factor, unclear pronunciation, accents, speed of delivery, lack of visual support and inability to get things repeated are pointed out by the subjects. The “physical setting” category chronicles students’ problems with noise and poor-quality tapes or discs.
Another study of students’ listening problems is recorded in Hasan (2000). By distributing questionnaires to 81 Arabic English for Special Purposes (ESP) students, Mr. Hasan gleans listening problems with “learner strategies,” “listening text,”
“speaker,” and “listener attitudes.” For “learner strategies,” listen to every detail
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exacerbates listening. Under the “listening text,” unfamiliar words, difficult grammatical structures, and length of spoken texts are obstacles for students. Prediction, interactive listening, and summary are “listening tasks” that pose trouble on students.
Problems related to natural speech, unclear pronunciation, accents, and the disappearance of the speaker are categorized under “speaker.” “Listener attitudes”
involves the lack of interest, demand for answers, and the message on audio-tapes.
Some of the problem categories are not clear cut. Zhang and Zhang (2011) point out that problems in their “meaning” factor could be attributed to different categories in Anderson’s (1985) model. According to Zhang and Zhang (2011), when one cannot understand the intended messages or key ideas of the inputs, he/she suffers factor one, meaning problems. This is put under the utilization phase in Anderson’s (1985) model.
But when one cannot understand long sentences, words with more than one meaning or next parts because of earlier problems, he/she is said to be attacked by parsing problems in Anderson’s (1985) model, though these problems are all also categorized under the meaning factor in Zhang and Zhang (2011). To make the matter more complicated, lengthy sentences is regarded as one of the “discourse” variables in Yousif (2006) and one of the “text” factors in Yang (20011), Chang, Wu and Pang (2013), and Hasan (2000). But it is in the “meaning” factor in Zhang and Zhang (2011), and “listening materials” in Hamouda (2012). As Anderson (1985) himself has pointed out, the three-phase comprehension process is interrelated and recursive, which means that the three phases of comprehension might happen concurrently, even in a single listening comprehension event.
From the research of listening comprehension difficulties that do not follow Anderson’s (1985) model, it can be found that some of the difficulties or difficulty categories are not discussed in Anderson’s (1985) comprehension process model at all.
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Problems related to “acoustic” variables in Yousif (2006) are talked under “input and surroundings” in Chang, Wu, and Pang (2013), “physical settings” by Hamouda (2012), and “listener attitudes” for Hasan (2000). Psychological variables are considered as
“listener” factors in Chang, Wu and Peng (2011), Yousif (2006), Yang (2011), and as parts of “listener attitudes” in Hasan (2000). Task factors are mentioned in Yang (2011), Chang, Wu, and Peng (2011) and Hasan (2000). Chang, Wu and Peng (2011) are unique in proposing the relevance and interests of the input material and Yousif (2006) specially deals with environmental variables for some of the listening comprehension difficulties. All in all, the above categories are not associated with Anderson’s (1985) model.
Though the adoption of Anderson’s (1985) situate listening comprehension difficulties in a cognitive framework, it seems to pre-exclude some of the possible listening comprehension difficulties. By following Anderson’s (1985) model, the investigation of listening comprehension is restricted to the processing of language inputs. The construction of questionnaires and semi-structured interviews limit the direction of students’ response on listening comprehension difficulties. Students’
psychological reactions toward listening comprehension is then ignored. The focus on listening comprehension process also exempts the consideration of acoustic factors.
When researchers construct questionnaires of listening comprehension difficulties according to Anderson’s (1985) model, they might overlook aspects that do not directly link to comprehension processes.
Another possible reason for the discrepancy of listening comprehension difficulties between those that resort to Anderson’s (1985) model and those that don’t is the scope of situations for listening comprehension. Though Goh (2000) have students record their listening comprehension problems in diaries, the listening events
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her students encounter seem to be restricted to tests. On the contrary, Yang’s (2011) students listen to at least one learning program in English each week and write a listening journal, which broadens the possibilities of diverse listening inputs and environments. It is no surprising that task factors show up in her research. Yousif (2006) probes students’ listening comprehension difficulties when listening to English lectures and thus brings the issue of environmental variable to the discussion.
Some exploratory study do not categorize listening comprehension difficulties at all, but they still contribute to the understanding of listening comprehension difficulties.
The following are listening difficulty found in other study that are not discussed in previous paragraphs. Whooley’s (1991) college students report that the professors are not captivating and other students are distracting as sources of listening comprehension difficulties in class. A similar result is found in McDevitt, Sheehan and Cooney’s (1994) college subjects, who also have students having no difficulties with listening. Boyle (1983) reminds that students’ general intelligence, background knowledge and learning experience could affect their listening comprehension, and so do speakers’ personality and language proficiency as well as supports provided, such as gestures or visuals.
Ghoneim’s (2013) students have difficulties identifying proper names or places, understanding numbers and seem to hear words that could not be connected to the topic.
Tinkler (1987) maintains that lack of exposure to natural English and lack of prediction could result to listening comprehension difficulties. Juan and Abidin’s (2013) Chinese students tend to translate the English inputs into Chinese and confound themselves while listening. They also lack patience and perseverance in listening to English.
Zhong (2011) probes the lag factors of students’ English listening comprehension in ethnic regions and finds that students have difficulties identifying the contexts of the speech, guessing words and thinking in English. Solak and Altay’s (2014) Turkish
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students worry about not being able to check their understanding, find out the main purpose of the listening task, make a mental summary of information, relate latter parts with previous parts, make meaning personal associations with the information, evaluate overall accuracy of comprehension, use strategies, answer wh-questions or fill a grid while listening, make generalization, and reduce anxiety.