ESL Learners’ Perception of the Medium of Listening

Abstract

Listening is the most significant part of communication as it is pivotal in providing a substantial and meaningful response while playing a vital role being one of the four major skills in language acquisition. Further, being a receptive skill that is first developed in a human being, listening awakens awareness of the language. Consequently, sound, rhythm, intonation, and stress of the language can only be adapted through listening. Other than being the primary form of communication, listening assists learner to understand the beauty of the language forming the concrete basis for complete language proficiency. Hence, the current research was conducted with the objective of ascertaining ESL learners’ perception of the media of listening and randomly selected sample of 44 undergraduates at Uva Wellassa University were utilized while employing questionnaire survey and observations to collect primary data. Accordingly, the result revealed that the majority (52%) listen to English frequently at the university or college while 39% of the respondents listen to English by using television or audio equipment. Consequently, more than half of the respondents (52%) prefer to listen to English spoken in Great Britain while nearly one forth (26%) of the respondents’ preference is to listen to the USA variety. Moreover, similar percentages (48%) of ESL learners have learned to listen to English through teachers at their schools as well as movies and music. However, only 17% have learned to listen to English through English courses and seminars. As perceived by the participants, the biggest obstacle they encounter in listening is, understanding rapid speech of native speakers (39%) and vocabulary (39%). Hence, the results are advantages to facilitate ESL learners to acquire listening skills while exposing learners to a variety of listening comprehension tasks implementing both bottom-up and top-down processes. These are some suggestions to overcome the challenges in listening as well as to upgrade listening skills of students.