LISTENING COMPREHENSION STRATEGIES AND DIFFICULTIES THE CASE OF FIRST-YEAR EFL LEARNERS AT THE UNIVERSITY OF TLEMCEN

Abstract

Within the field of EFL education, various investigations have been carried out for the purpose of revealing the pedagogical issues that learners encounter throughout their studies, the results gathered from those experiments have shown that learners’ weaknesses are mainly due to learners’ and ineffective strategy use. This research tends to look for the main difficulties encountered by first year EFL students in listening comprehension, and the strategies they use in order to improve their achievement. For this purpose the following general research question is put forward:  What are the difficulties and the strategies of first year EFL students in listening comprehension? From this general question the three following secondary research questions are derived: 1- Are first year EFL students aware of the importance of listening comprehension? 2- What are the main difficulties encountered by first year EFL learners in listening comprehension? 3- Do first EFL students use any strategies in order to improve their achievement in listening comprehension? These questions led to formulate the following hypotheses: 1- First year EFL students may not be aware of the importance of listening comprehension. 2- First year EFL learners may encounter difficulties related to - Speech rate - Lack of prior knowledge of the target language