L2 Listening Skills

Increasing involvement with students at some universities has indicated their overall difficulty with comprehending and recalling information from aural contents. It has also been observed that in general very little attention has been given to the development of listening skills in their previous learning years. For this study, two tools were utilized for data collection; a questionnaire to determine the perceptions of students' learning preference, needs, difficulties and proficiencies and using course-book audio files to enhance students’ listening comprehension. The research tries to make use of course-book audio files as an educational tool through which listening can be taught and understood by adult learners. The research was conducted

Although listening definitions differ to some extent, they basically consider listening as a mental process that requires a great deal of cognitive effort on the part of the listener such as interpreting the sounds, figuring out the meaning of the words, and activating the background knowledge. What makes listening difficult in a second language? There has been a general agreement in L2 listening research that all second language learners encounter difficulties while listening to the target language. However, the degree and types of the difficulty differ, and many L2 listening research has been conducted to examine these differences or to identify the factors that can influence the difficulties that face the listener, (Flowerdew and Miller,

That means students need to meet authentic material inside the classrooms in order to be able to comprehend and communicate outside the classrooms in real situations. She also stated that real-life listening does not occur in a vacuum but rather in a rich social context (p. 65), which she sees as a reason for using authentic input in the classroom. Authentic input also varies in difficulty and style. (Shoamy, and (Inbar, (1991) cited by (Carrier, (1999), have shown how different types of input can affect listening comprehension. They exposed students to three different types of text: newscasts, lectures, and spontaneous dialogues and found that the most difficult type of text to understand was the newscast while the easiest to comprehend was the spontaneous dialogue. (Field, (1998) explained that earlier listening comprehension teaching focused on the product (the correct answer) and believed that the focus has now changed to the listening process (how students arrive at their answer). (Buck, (2001) also discussed this process explaining that listening takes place inside the listener's brain and that knowledge is constructed from the spoken text. Listening takes place in real time and, in normal circumstances, a spoken text is only heard once (Buck, (2001). Automatic processes happen without conscious