One of the biggest problems facing the learners when listening to foreign language is the matter of identifying sounds. This problem is commonly encountered by learners of English as a foreign language. As stated in Rixon (1986, p. 38), one of the most common problems encountered by students is the way English words are pronounced, but unfortunately this aspect of English cannot be overlooked as pronunciation of English can cause students problems in recognition, and therefore in comprehension.
Rixon proposes four explanations for the difficulty caused by English sounds. The first difficulty is caused by different ways to pronounce the same sound:
… there are two ways how to pronounce sound /t/. In so called BBC English one of the ways engages aspiration, hissing sounds, this happens if the /t/ is placed at the beginning of the syllables. Students who have no experience with aspiration in their mother tongue can hear /st/.
Rixon (1986,p. 38)
The second difficulty appears as a result of differences between English sounds and their spellings, “As there is a difference between the spoken and written form of words in English students can fail to identify the pronounced form of words they know in written form” (Rixon, 1986,p. 38).
Rixon asserts the necessity of students‟ awareness of English connected speech, which makes it difficult for learners to recognize individual words. He goes on talking about this phenomenon in relation to stressed/ unstressed vowel sounds:
In natural speech listeners can encounter three main types of a change in sound involving weak form of vowels. This means that words that are in unstressed positions have different pronunciation in comparison with stressed vowels e.g. when to is said in isolation it is pronounced as /tu:/, but on the other hand, in connected speech the pronunciation changes into /tə/. (Ibid.)
Elision and assimilation, in Rixon‟s view, are reasons for this difficulty:
Another factor of connected speech is called elision. This means a loss of sounds appearing in natural speech e.g. the word probably is pronounced /probli/. The third factor of connected speech is called assimilation. Assimilation means that a pronunciation of a letter can be influenced by the letter before or after it so that it changes its sound e.g. ten bikes can be pronounced /tem baiks/. (Ibid.)
Another aspect of sounds is that there are sounds that do not exist in students‟ first language or there are pairs of sounds that seem to be indistinguishable to learners.
The following example given by Ur (1996, p. 11) is about a problem his French student faces:
The sound /θ/ as in ‘think’, for example, does not exist in French; a native French speaker may very often therefore not notice at first that it occurs in English – he may simply assimilate it to the nearest sound familiar to him and say /s/ or /f/.
Ur points out the fact that it may take a Hebrew learner quite a long time to practise distinguishing differences between „ship‟ and „sheep‟ or „fit‟ and „feet‟ as Hebrew does not have similar sounds.
At the same time, Ur (1996) is concerned about the sequences and juxtapositions of sounds. For example, a chain of successive consonants (or consonant cluster) also brings a source of problems to listeners. They can get the consonants in the wrong order (hearing „parts‟ for „past‟), or omit one of the sounds („crips‟ for „crisps‟) Also concerning this problem, Brown (1990) adds students are not able to use the phonological code well enough to identify which words are being used by the speaker and how these are organized into sentences. He assigns the reason for this
to the fact that students are relatively more successful at interpreting the written form of the language.
1.3.2. Problem of understanding stress and intonation
When second language listener has limitation in other decoding skills, understanding the stress and intonation of the speech can be a means of support to them. Though the pressures of the group may lead to some words becoming reduced in form and thus more difficult to identify, there is a compensating benefit in that focal stress serves to foreground the most important piece of information. For the L2 listener, it provides a basis for forming hypotheses about what a speaker said when very little else may have been understood.
It has been argued that apart from instruction in pronunciation for isolated words and sentences, more attention needs to be paid to intonation training because learners who have better understanding about prosodic features are shown to be more proficient in English. According to Fan (1993), instead of intonation and rhythm, English learners pay more attention to the sounds (word pronunciation), vocabulary, and grammar when they are listening to English. This is the reason why many English learners complain about the speed of the listening texts being too fast from time to time. In their study, Hsieh, Dong and Wang (2013) cited Gilbert (1994) that intonation allows people to follow the flow of information in spoken English. They also stated Pickering (2004) and Wennerstorm (2004) that if the speaker can use appropriate intonation structure at the discourse level, recipients will perceive the speaker‟s English to be more intelligible. They also indicate that with the use of intonation structure at the discourse level, not only is intelligibility increased, but learners‟ fossilized pronunciation is also found to be improved.
Therefore, inability to interpret intonation and stress pattern correctly will hinder listening process.
1.3.3. Problem of understanding different accents
Various accents can cause students another problem in acquiring listening skills. If students are frequently exposed to just one or two accents and get familiar with
them, they will be confused when hearing someone with a different accent. They can perceive that kind of accent as unfamiliar or even wrong. According to Ur (1996), there is rarely such a thing as a „wrong‟ accent: there are simply accents that are more or less difficult to understand.
Ur also states that many foreign-language learners who are used to the accent of their own teacher are surprised and dismayed when they find they have difficulty understanding someone else.
Fan (1993) also argues that usually ESL/EFL listeners are used to “their teacher‟s accent or to the standard variety of British or American English”. In this case, teachers have to familiarize students with both British and American accents.
Munro and Derwing (1998) claim that too many genres of accented speech may result in a significant reduction in comprehension. This is certainly true because unfamiliar accents produced by strange speakers may make listeners unable to identify sounds correctly, and therefore, prevent their understanding the language.
1.3.4. Problem of mismatch between learners’ vocabulary and vocabulary used in listening texts
Owning a narrow range of vocabulary offers challenges to learners in mastering listening skills. Hung (1998), as cited in Bingol (2014), agrees that listening passages with known words are easier for learners to understand, even if the theme is unknown to them. His research also points out that knowing the meaning of the words might arouse students learning interest and lead to a positive effect in listening ability.
On the other hand, for listeners who do not know all vocabulary used by the speaker, listening can be very stressful as they usually start thinking about the meaning and, as a result of this, they miss the following information (Underwood, 1989).
Another problem related to vocabulary is that learners fail to recognize words they have learned. There are two reasons for this occurrence. First, learners often learn a
word in its isolation with formal pronunciation, so they find it difficult to catch that word in a stream of speech. According to Ur (1996), if a word is pronounced differently in informal speech from the way it is said formally, or was said when it was learnt, the listener may simply not recognize it as the same word, or even miss its existence completely.
He adds that mastering new items to the stage of total familiarity is a very gradual process. It takes time before a newly-learnt word becomes known well enough to be readily recognized. Second, the use of the same word varies from context to
context. For examples, certain expressions are common in colloquial English, but more or less taboo in formal style.
White, in his book on listening (1998), also mentions that it is impossible for learners to make out some words or phrases at all because they are words students have never heard before, or they are words that are familiar, but not in their reduced form.
This can be seen as both the problem of vocabulary and the problem of pronunciation.
1.3.5. Problem of mismatch between learners’ syntactic knowledge and syntax used in listening texts
The listening text is usually in a more unpredictable style compared with that for reading. The spoken language is not fixed as the written one and speakers can easily change their way of using language. In other word, the content of listening text is not well-organized. Brown and Yule (1983, p. 12) also state that there are a number of differences between spoken discourse and written discourse which are important in learning EFL listening. That is, while the spoken language is syntactically simpler, the written language is relatively complex. Therefore if the listener is unable to segment and simplify complex sentences and turn them into more basic syntactic units, they will fail to comprehend the text.
Anderson and Linch (1998), as cited in Cook (1973), D‟Anglejan and Tucker (1975) that it seems that the input which is syntactically difficult for young children
causes comparable problems for older foreign learners, who – in the initial stages of L2 learning – appear not to benefit from their L1 experience of similarity difficult surface structures.
1.4. Problems related to top-down processing