A Study of Probable Reasons for Saudi Learners’ Weakness in Listening Comprehension

This study investigates the listening comprehension problems of Saudi students. Forty Saudi postgraduate students from both genders (24 males and 16 females) participated in the study and all participants were postgraduate students at the University of Essex in the UK. The questionnaire was the only instrument used to collect data. The main findings of the study discovered were related to listeners first. Secondly, the study showed a significant difference between the academic lectures or seminars in five problems related to both listener and text, while thirdly the study showed a non-significant difference between the Saudi male and female students in terms of listening comprehension. Fourthly, the study discovered that the LC problems vary based on the learners’ academic levels as the LC problems get fewer when the academic level gets higher, confirming negative correlations between academic level and LC problems. After applying aggression analysis on some variables, the study also demonstrated that the length of studying English has a remarkable effect on the LC for Saudi students.


Introduction
Listening skills are considered as critical dimension in language learning and the most significant communication skill in people's lives.Moreover, listening is considered essential in terms of second language acquisition according to Rost (2011), who mentioned that "a key difference between more successful and less successful acquirers relates in large part to their ability to use listening as a means of acquisition" (p.94).Therefore, the significance of listening cannot be ignored as the first step towards language learning and acquisition.Despite this, it is still considered as one of the least developed and understood processes among language learners.Morley (2001) mentioned that listening received special attention within instructional frameworks during the 1980s.However, in the 1990s, the importance of listening increased drastically as one of the most important skills in language instruction; presently, listening comprehension is considered as significant aspect of language learning.However, "much of work remains to be done in both theory and practice" (Morley, 2001, p. 69).Conway (1982) argued that poor listening skills are considered as a main reason for the failure of university students as these problems make communication difficult.
From his experience in EFL teaching, the researcher noticed that the Saudi learners were unable to score good marks in listening tests including IELTS sub section listening examination.Moreover, the learners sometimes cannot understand what is said in academic settings and casual conversations with native speakers, which means that the Saudi learners of English find it hard to comprehend what they hear.Thus, the researcher has dedicated this study to exploring the issues related to LC such as the most frequent problems among Saudi learners in two communication settings, in addition to identifying the real reasons which prevent Saudi EFL learners' from accessing good solutions which could remedy this problem.Moreover, the effect of some variables on listening comprehension is also explored.

Importance of Listening for the Language Learner
Listening skills were neglected at the beginning of the 1970s.However, as mentioned before the importance of listening increased enormously during the 1990s as a vital skill in language teaching (Morley, 2001) 2).To explore the effect of gender, academic level, years of studying English and the time spent listening by Saudi learners.

Research Question
The present study seeks to obtain information about the listening comprehension problems faced by Saudi postgraduate students studying in the University of Essex.

1)
What listening comprehension problems do Saudi learners encounter most while listening to academic lectures/seminars?
2) Are there any differences between Saudi male and female learners in LC problems?
3) Do LC problems vary according to learners' academic levels?4) Are there fewer LC problems depending on how long a student has been studying English? 5) Are there fewer LC problems depending on how much time a learner spends listening to English?

Listening Comprehension Problems
Listening comprehension is a complex process and there are various reasons influencing the comprehension in the process.Underwood (1989) provided seven possible reasons for problems with efficient listening comprehension: first, the speed of delivery of the text; second, listeners will not be able to have words repeated at all times; third, listeners have limited vocabulary; fourth, listeners could fail to identify the signs of the spoken language; fifth, the listener has a lack of context; sixth, the listeners may not understand when they hear something in their second language; and seventh, some learners take into account certain learning habits and they concentrate on them such as a wish to understand every word they hear.Furthermore, Yagang (1994) indicated that listening problems are related to four factors: the message, the speaker, the listener, and the physical setting.Hasan (2000) indicated that unfamiliar words, difficult grammatical structures, and the length of the spoken passages are the most important factors that cause problems for learners' listening comprehension.He continued by highlighting clarity, lack of interest, and the demand for complete answers to listening comprehension questions as the most serious difficulties faced by students.Teng (2002) indicated that there are two types of factors which could affect listening comprehension: the first is the internal factor, which indicates the listener themselves, and the second is the external factor which represents aspects outside of the listener, for example the speaker, stimulus and context.Chen (2002) conducted a study on university students with LC problems.The study discovered five problems as the most frequent issues faced by learners.The first problem is that the learners focused on figuring out the meaning of part of the listening content and missed the other part.Second, students were unable to unpick streams of speech.Third, the learners did not recognize words they know.Fourth, they were not certain regarding key ideas within the text.Finally, they were unable to form a mental representation from the words they heard.Graham (2006) stated that there are some other factors that increase learners' listening comprehension problems, for example restricted vocabulary, poor grammar, and misinterpretations about listening tasks.Rost (2011) provided four factors affecting LC which include the medium of the input, the nature of the input, the nature of the assessment task, and individual listener factors.Bloomfield et al. (2010) and Walker (2014) expressed that one of the serious problems of listening comprehension is related to the pronunciation of words, which is often different from the way they appear in print.
Finally, from the literature provided in this paper, it appears that listening comprehension is problematic for many FL learners.Researchers attribute this to factors that relate to characteristics of the listener, text, task, and process (Rubin, 1994).These studies have highlighted many factors that hinder learners' LC.Some of them are related to linguistic features of language and the content of listening text, while others are related the listener, the speaker and also the physical situation at the time of listening.

Subjects
The participants of the study were forty Saudi male and female postgraduate students from different departments of the University of Essex, UK.They were selected randomly, subject to willingness to participate in the current study.All of the Saudi students who participated in the present study were holders of the Saudi government scholarship to study in the University of Essex, UK.
All participants had passed IELTS proficiency test between 2007 and 2011.Their average listening score in IELTS was 5.54 (MIN=4, MAX=7, SD=.75) and the average overall score was 5.83 (MIN=5, MAX=7, SD=.56).The proficiency level of the participants in English communication skills ranged from bad to excellent according to their own self-assessments of these skills.The self-assessments of the participants indicated that the proficiency level of the Saudi students in listening was not bad; however, it ranged between satisfactory and good in their self-assessments of the four communication skills of English.The details of self-reported assessment of the students in the communication skills of English are given in Table 2

Instruments
The instrument that was used for collecting data was a questionnaire.The researcher designed the questionnaire items carefully on the basis of several previous studies (e.g., Boyle, 1984;Samules, 1984;Hwang, 2003;Underwood, 1989) in order to suit the population of the study and to provide the required information that could help him to answer the RQs reported in the current study.
The questionnaire designed for this study was divided into three main sections.These were labelled A, B and C and contained a total of seventeen questions.Section (A) was related to the personal background of the participants in order to obtain demographic information such as age, gender, major and academic level.Section (B) was related to English background and the experiences of the participants to answer the RQs that investigate the correlation between these experiences and the participants' LC problems such as their English proficiency, years spent studying English, and their listening experiences such as hours and methods.Moreover, the questionnaire contained a list of thirteen items.The answers to this question are recorded on a five-point Likert scale which consisted of five choices: 1 never; 2 rarely; 3 sometimes; 4 often; 5 always.

Data Collection Procedure
The present study was conducted on Saudi postgraduate students who were studying in the University of Essex by using a questionnaire.The researcher started distributing the questionnaires individually for all the participants who agreed to take part in the study.This process took place in different locations both inside and outside the University, and it took about two weeks for the questionnaires to be answered fully and then returned to the researcher.

Data Analysis Procedure
The study adopted quantitative research.Therefore, it was analysed in a quantitative manner by using the SPSS programme, version 19 to answer the research questions.The most and least frequent difficulties in listening comprehension are determined for each listening situation asked about based on the frequencies of the learners who experienced the difficulties.The comparisons between MA and PhD students and male and female students will be carried out using the Mann -Whitney test.Furthermore, the Wilcoxon test will be used to compare the two listening situations.
The Spearman rho test will be applied to measure the correlation between the frequency of listening comprehension problems and the given variables, which are the time spent studying English and the time spent listening to English.Finally, a regression analysis will be applied to determine which of these variables has the strongest effect on the LC of the Saudi students in each listening situation.For non-significant results, only p ijel.ccsenet.
values wil

Results
In this sec by one, an

1) What l academic
The   English?
nglish in semi mber of hours 2017 inars, they spend in listening to English, whether inside the classroom when they attend their lectures or seminars or outside classrooms when they listen to radio, TV or have conversations with people.All of the listening hours mentioned by the Saudi students in their responses in the questionnaire have been combined.
Therefore, to answer this question, Spearman's correlation test was applied to identify the correlation between the length of time spent by MA students (M=36.13hours, MIN=14, MAX=89, SD=17.50) and the time spent by PhD students (M=27.81hours, MIN=6, MAX=49, SD=12.60)listening to English and the LC problems related to academic lectures or seminars.The test showed that there is no significant correlation (p>.05) between the overall time spent listening to English by the MA and PhD Saudi students on a weekly basis and the problems related to their LC in academic lectures or seminars as one of the two listening situations.
However, this finding is inconsistent with many researchers who have considered that the practice of listening could be useful in reducing the learners' problems with LC.The result was not highly different in this type of listening situation compared to the previous listening situation (i.e.academic lectures or seminars) as the results of the test showed that there is only a moderate negative correlation (Correlation Coefficient(r) = -.334,sig= .03) between the LC problems of Saudi students in casual conversation and the overall weekly listening hours of the Saudi students.The moderate negative correlation was only with the problem of colloquial language (sig=.03)faced by learners in this setting.Additionally, the correlation between other problems related to listening comprehension and overall listening hours of English spent by the Saudi students was non-significant (p>.05).
The test results can be clearly seen in the Table 6 and Figure 7.

Conclusion and Recommendations
This study was conducted to explore listening comprehension problems among Saudis in addition to researching several correlations with Saudi learners' comprehension problems.The study was conducted by adopting a questionnaire.The findings demonstrate that that lack of prior knowledge regarding the listening topic came first followed by concentration, while a difficult accent come first in terms of LC difficulty.While the use of unfamiliar words, fast speech came as second place reasons as in difficulty LC for the students.Moreover, the study indicated that there is no significant correlation between males and females in the issue of listening comprehension.The study also confirmed that listening comprehension is affected at the academic level; when it goes up, the LC problems go down and the opposite is true.Finally, the study showed that the only significant correlation with listening comprehension was the time spent learning English by the EFL learners because when the learners spend more time learning English, their problems with LC will be reduced.

Recommendations
Based on the study findings, the researcher makes some recommendations for future researchers in this field.

•
It would be better if investigations are conducted based on the strategies that could contribute to reducing the listening comprehension problems.

•
It would be useful for the researchers if they employed more research methods in future studies including classroom observations, listening comprehension tests and think-aloud protocols in order to increase the credibility and validity of their results.

•
It would be better if the researchers explored the influence of more LC problems.
• It is hoped that more studies will be conducted with large samples of learners in order to be generalized. .

Table 2 .
The self-reported proficiency level of the students in English communication skills

Table 7 .
Correlation between the time spent listening to English and LC problems related to lectures/seminars Linguistics glish and LC pr glish and LC p

Table 9 .
Regression analysis for listening in academic lectures or seminars

Dependent Variable: Listening in lectures or academic seminarsTable 10 .
Regression analysis for listening in casual conversation