Exploring Listening Comprehension Difficulties Observed Among Korean High School Students

Abstract

This study reports the listening difficulties encountered by Korean learners of English while engaged in transactional listening. Twenty learners listened to four texts, providing both think-aloud and retrospective data. They experienced a total of eleven types of listening difficulties and twelve causes of the difficulties. The predominant difficulties took place at the perceptual stage. This was especially noted by the less proficient learners and with more difficult texts. The more proficient learners, because of their greater linguistic proficiency, were better able to progress to a higher level of processing, regardless of the difficulty of the texts. The less proficient learners could advance to a higher level of processing when listening to easier texts. Based on the findings, the priority, in English classrooms, should be placed on improving the learners′ basic decoding skills. For this, input within the grasp of the learners′ comprehension, in the form of extended discourse spoken in natural oral English, should be introduced and pre-listening sessions should be implemented.