xxxii Sometimes, students feel tired and bored to listen, if the discourse is too long.
They also feel more difficult to concentrate: The solution of this problem is similar with the third problem.
Similar to Penny Ur 1996: 113, Rost 1994: 119 has identified the listeners problems as follows: acuity of hearing, discrimination and auditory perception,
attention and concentration, comprehension including four aspects, namely: factual or literal comprehension, interpretation, critical listening, and evolutional listening.
5. Difficulties in Listening
According to many experts among others Dunkel, 1991; Richards, 1983; and Ur, 1984, there are eight factors making listening difficult as follows:
a Clustering Because of the limitation of memory and predisposition for clustering, we need
to break down speech into small groups of words. In teaching listening comprehension, the teacher needs to help students to pick out manageable
cluster of words. b Redundancy
Spoken language is different from written language, it has a good deal of redundancy. So, the learners might initially get confused by this, they need
some training to take advantage of redundancies as well as other markers that provide more processing time.
xxxiii c Reduced form
Spoken language has also many reduced forms. Reduction can be morphological, phonological, syntactic , pragmatic and so on. These reductions pose significant
difficulties, especially for classroom learners who have initially been exposed to the full forms of English language.
d Performance variables Everyday casual speech by native speakers also commonly contains
ungrammatical forms, they might be understood easily to native speakers, but
might not be easy to second language learners.
e Colloquial language English learners might have difficulties to deal with colloquial language.
Colloquialisms appear in both monologues and dialogues, they make learners have difficulties to listen to them. Colloquialisms cover idioms, slang,
reduced forms and so on. f Rate of delivery
Virtually every language learner thinks that native speakers speak very fast. The speed of speaking can influence the understanding of the listeners.
g Stress, rhythm, and intonation The prosodic features of the English language are very important for
comprehension. Because English is a stress-timed language, English can be a
xxxiv terror for learners as mouthfuls of syllables come spilling out between stressed
points. h Interaction
Conversation is especially subject to all the rules of interaction : negotiation, clarification, attending signals, turn-taking, and so on. So, learning to listen is
also to learn to respond and to continue a chain and responding. Learners should be trained that good listeners are good responders.
6. Listening Proficiency
