The Nature of Listening The Process in Listening

19 students when they lack the understanding different accents from around the world. Research conducted by Weyant 2007 discussed the use of audio recording of two women speaking in English with different accents. Both speakers read the same script, but the content of the two recordings is the same. However, one of the women speaks English as her first language, whereas another speaks Spanish as her first language. Both women speak English fluently and could be understood readily, but the one who speaks English as the second language has a recognizable accent. The accents influence the speakers‟ speaking reflecting that they come from different countries and use English differently. The non-native English speaker speaks in English with her Spanish accent that is recognizable. Another research on non-native speaker accent is also conducted by Ari and Keysar 2010. The result shows that the non-native speech is harder to understand. The accent makes the non-native speakers sound less credible. Thus, the accented speech of non-native speakers is considered as less truthful than native speaker‟ speech.

C. Theoretical Framework

There are two main points involved in this theoretical framework. To answer the first research question about how the students perceived the English accents, the researcher uses the theory of the factors that influence perception 20 from Altman et al., 1985, the factors that influence listening, and understanding different accent. To answer the second research question about the challenges that students find in listening to the English accents, the researcher uses two theories. The first theory is the factors that influence the listening skill such as the speed, the clarity of the speaker, and motivation. The second theory is the challenges that are found in listening to the non-native English accents such as the accent, the pronunciation, the stress, the intonation, the dialect, and the rhythm. Furthermore, to determine how the students perceives the accents of non- native English speakers, some theories that had been discussed in theoretical description are used to explore issues related to answering the research questions in this study.