The importance of listening in language learning and listening comprehension problems experienced by language learners: a literature review

Perception 
Do not recognize words they know 
Neglect the next part when thinking about meaning 
Cannot chunk streams of speech 
Miss the beginning of texts 
Concentrate too hard or unable to concentrate 
Parsing 
Quickly forget what is heard 
Unable to form a mental representation from words heard 
Do not understand subsequent parts of input because of earlier problems 
Utilization 
Understand words but not the intended message 
Confused about the key ideas in the message 
Figure 3. Problems related to different phases of listening comprehension
In another study which explored Arabic learners’ perceptions and beliefs about their 
listening comprehension problems in English, ineffective usage of listening strategies, 
the listening text itself, the speaker, the listening tasks and activities, the message, and 
listeners’ attitudes were found to be the sources of their listening comprehension 
problems. When students were asked to list their listening problems, the most common 
answers were poor classroom conditions, not having visual aids, unfamiliar vocabulary, 
unclear pronunciation, speech rate, boring topics and being exposed to longer texts 
(Hasan, 2000). 
Similar to Hasan’s (2000) study, Graham (2006) looked at the learners’ perspectives of 
listening comprehension problems. She also investigated learners’ views of the reasons 
behind their success. The participants were a group of high school students who were 
studying French as a foreign language. The data were collected through questionnaires 
and semi-structured interviews. The results of the study revealed that dealing with the 
delivery of the spoken text, trying to hear and understand the individual words were some 
of the problems reported by the learners. Most learners stated that their low listening 

---

The importance of listening in language learning and listening comprehension problems… 
2104 
ability, difficulties of the tasks and the texts, and not being aware of effective listening 
strategies were the factors that affected their success. 
One of the latest studies about students’ listening comprehension problems was 
conducted by Hamouda (2012) with 60 EFL Saudi learners. The results revealed that the 
students’ major listening comprehension problems were pronunciation, speed of speech, 
insufficient vocabulary, different accent of speakers, lack of concentration, anxiety, and 
bad quality of recording. 
In another recent study Yıldırım (2013) explored teachers’ perceptions of university level 
students’ listening comprehension problems in order to compare them with the students’ 
perceptions, as well as to probe into teachers’ reported classroom practices to deal with 
these listening comprehension problems. With this aim, the study was carried out with 
423 B1.2 level EFL learners and 49 teachers in Turkey. The results of the quantitative 
data analysis revealed that, except for one item, teachers’ mean scores were always higher 
than students’ mean scores, which indicates that students do not experience listening 
comprehension problems as frequently as their teachers think, and teachers may be more 
aware of listening comprehension problems than their students. The analysis of the 
interviews revealed that, all of the participating teachers considered listening as a very 
important skill for their students. In addition, it is found that although teachers have 
different perceptions among themselves and have different years of experiences, when 
their reported classroom practices are considered, they perform similarly in the classroom 
in order to help their students to overcome their listening comprehension problems.