The Effect of Teaching Experience on English Language Teachers’ Perceptions of Learners’ Listening Comprehension Problems

Abstract

Most of the studies on listening in a foreign language focus on the learner perspective, whereas research on teacher perspective is quite limited. The purpose of the study reported in this paper was to focus on listening from the teachers’ perspective and investigate the effect of teaching experience on English language teachers’ perceptions of learners’ listening comprehension problems. The participants of this study were 148 English language teachers in Turkey, 81 of these participants were pre-service teachers studying their final semester in the English language teacher education department of a state university, and 67 of them were English language teachers working at public schools for at least five years. The data collection instrument was a perception questionnaire, Hierarchical Multiple Regression Analysis was used as the main data analysis method, and Pearson’s product-moment correlation coefficients and independent-samples t-tests were also used in order to better interpret the findings. The results of the study suggested that pre-service teachers have more optimistic perceptions of learners’ listening comprehension problems as they think learners experience problems less frequently when compared to their in-service colleagues.