Looking through students’ listening difficulty and its relation to students’ listening self-efficacy and listening proficiency is the main focus of the present study. But an understanding of students’ listening difficulty would entail the necessity to identify methods to cope with these difficulty. The aim of the individual interview is to extract strategies that students employ to tackle with these difficulties.
To select representative interviewees, the researcher looked through the data of students’ answers on the English listening self-efficacy scale and their performance on the English listening test. The upper quarter and the lower quarter of students who are high (HS) or low (LS) in listening self-efficacy are singled out at first. Then, the researcher compared their scores on the English listening test and found out that out of 27 students in the HS group, 24 of them also belonged to students of high English listening proficiency (HL). On the other hand, from the 27 students in the LS group,
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one can also spot 23 students who are poor in listening (LL). The researcher decided to invite these students, who are either both high in listening self-efficacy and listening proficiency or both low in listening self-efficacy and listening proficiency, as targets for the interview.
To encourage free-thinking of the answers, the researcher kept the interviewing question simple and with the fewest reminders possible. The open ended question goes as “What do you do when you meet problems during English listening?” The students are encouraged to pronounce at least five ways that help them cope with listening difficulty, though some of them fail to attain the standard. The answers of the students are collected in Table 6, the numbers in the parenthesis after each strategy indicate how many students refer to that specific strategy.
Since some of the methods that students named have overlapped, there are only 27 methods relating to English listening listed in Table 6. By following Oxford (2011), the researcher identifies language learning strategies as cognitive, affective, and sociocultural-interactive strategies. Oxford (2011) also has categorized meta-strategies, but those strategies do not appear in students’ answers and are not included here. The researcher also finds that some of the techniques used by students seem more to be test-taking strategies than problem-solving methods. In addition, some of the strategies enunciated by students are not ways to cope with listening difficulty but rather some training to improve English listening abilities.
The first twelve strategies in Table 6 conform to the categorization of language learning strategies in Oxford’s (2011) taxonomy. And they are divided into cognitive, affective, and sociocultural-interactive strategies. Strategies that are used to tackle with test-taking situations are discussed latter, and strategies that students use to train themselves for English listening are also displayed.
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Table 6. Students’ Strategies in Response to English Listening Difficulty
Language Learning Strategies 1. Cognitive strategy
(1) Replay the CD and listen again. (3)
(2) Repeat the listening material in one’s mind. (3) (3) Look up the dictionary for unknown words. (1) (4) Listen to the main idea or key words. (3) (5) Write down key words. (2)
(6) Guess word meanings through the context. (6) (7) Translate English into Chinese. (3)
2. Affective strategy (1) Take it easy. (1)
3. Sociocultural-interactive strategy (1) Ask the speaker. (2)
(2) Ask others or the teacher. (4)
(3) If the volume is not loud enough, I will ask the teacher to turn up the volume. (1) (4) If the speaker speaks too fast, I will ask him/her to slow down. (2)
Test-taking strategy
1. Look at the questions and options before listen to the inputs. (3) 2. Choose words that I have heard from the options. (1)
3. Cross out options with unknown words. (1)
4. Write down words and then think about them later. (2)
5. When listen for the first time, I will mark the questions that I don’t understand and listen to them twice. (2)
6. Write the answers between each question instead of listening and writing at the same time. (2) 7. Be careful not to draw on the wrong columns of the answer sheet. (1)
Training English listening 1. Memorize vocabulary. (2)
2. Listen to English programs such as ICRT. (2) 3. Talk with foreigners. (1)
When encountering listening difficulty, some of the students choose to listen to the inputs again by replaying the CDs. Some students also repeat the heard material in their mind. Subvocal repetitions are processed in the working memory and are believed to assist second language learners’ acquisition (De Guerrero, 2004). A student mentions that she would look up unfamiliar words on the dictionary. This is possible when the listening practice is not in a test situation. In fact, the researcher, who is an EFL learner herself, also often checks new words on the dictionary when hearing unknown vocabulary.
Some students try to listen to the main idea or key words from the inputs. A related strategy is to write down some key words. As listening is a transient activity, note-taking is advised to remind listeners of crucial contents (Oxford, 2011). Sometimes,
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when students do not know the meanings of the words, they tend to guess the meaning from the context. The top-down conjecture of meanings is encouraged (Rumelhart, 1977). A common listening strategy adopted by these students is the translation method, which is also reported as prevalent among Chinese learners of English (Goh, 2002).
Remember the result of the listening difficulty questionnaire manifests that low-level listeners are intended to translate English listening inputs into Chinese in their mind and then fail to catch on the ensuing inputs. The translation strategy should be used with caution.
The only affective strategy elicited from the subjects is to take it easy. As one student points out, “When listening to English, I feel nervous and my heart beats faster.)”
When students get nervous during listening tasks, they have to calm down in order to concentrate. Since many of the listening activities for junior high school students are accompanied with assessments, it unavoidably adds pressure on the students. Rather than evaluating the performance of English listening practices, language teachers are advised to provide low-stake listening tasks and encourage relaxing listening contexts.
When students do not fully understand the inputs, they sometimes employ socio-interactive strategies by directly asking the speakers or by asking other people of better language proficiency. One of the students mentions that she would ask the teacher why one of the options is not accepted if there are two options that she has straddled about.
If given chances to talk with the speaker face to face, the students would also please speakers to slow down the pace if they fail to catch up with the speed. Two of the interviewees happened to join an international communication program by treating British teenagers to travel around Taipei. When asked about their listening difficulty, they both firstly referred themselves as understanding everything. But when the researcher probed their experiences of talking with the English peers, they admitted that
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they did not fully understand them due to their speed and accents. And in those cases, they would inquire them to speak slower. Chances for negotiation and clarification of meanings are only possible in bidirectional listening (Graham, 2006), and the students seem to make good use of the opportunities. The other socio-interactional strategy that students often use is to have their teacher turn up the volume of the CD for clearer listening inputs. Maybe that’s why the volume and clearance of listening inputs do not differentiate HS/LS or HL/LL students, for no matter how high or low their listening self-efficacy or proficiency is, they can always ask the teacher to adjust input volume for them.
As most junior high schools students engage in listening activities during English tests, they inescapably turn to test-taking strategies when being asked about their listening comprehension strategies. Some procedures for the students include reading multiple-choice questions and options beforehand, listening to the inputs and choosing options with words that one hears or knows while dropping options with unknown vocabulary. When in doubt, they would write down some key words or mark the questions and rethink them later. Some students try to write their answers during the pauses between questions, and they remind themselves not to circle the wrong answers on their answer sheets. Though these test-taking strategies do not guarantee excellent results, it offers insights for teachers and researchers to glance over students’ listening behaviors.
Although the researcher interviewed students’ strategies in solving listening comprehension problems, some of the students spontaneously expressed their tips for practicing listening comprehension. Quite a few of the students resort to vocabulary memorization as ways to improve their listening. Since the abundance of unknown words and words with multiple meanings are sources of difficulties for students of
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lower listening proficiency, as exemplified by Table 5, the students might be convinced to memorize more words to help themselves. Two students in particular alluded to listening to English programs. But when the researcher dug into the programs they listen to, one of them admitted that she never listens to English programs and the other one named ICRT. The students also assume talking with foreigners as ways to help increase English listening ability, but they also confess that they do not meet too many foreigners and when they do, they are too afraid to speak up.
Meeting listening difficulty, some of the students could not but give up. So they might just guess or skip questions. Interestingly, students report ways to guess their answers, which are not listed in Table 6. One student uses dice and another student recites her answer to see whether the permutation and combination of ABCDs sound appealing. The researcher, as the English teacher of these students, was the most disappointed when getting these given-up answers.
The strategies gathered from the interview are to supply the statistical data with strategies to cope with listening difficulty. It is hoped that with insights from junior high school students, teachers and researchers interested in listening difficulty could help desperate students in improving their English listening comprehension.
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