STUDENTS’ PROBLEMS IN LISTENING COMPREHENSION AT FIRST YEAR STUDENTS OF ENGLISH DEPARTMENT STKIP PGRI
WEST SUMATRA
Yola Ana Fionita
*), Sesmiyanti, S.S, M.Pd
**), dan Yola Merina, S.S, M.Hum
***).
*)Student of English Department STKIP PGRI West Sumatera Email: [email protected]
**)Lecturer at English Department STKIP PGRI West Sumatera Email: [email protected]
***)Lecturer at English Department STKIP PGRI West Sumatera Email: [email protected]
ABSTRACT
This research was aimed to find out the problems which are faced by the students in listening comprehension. This research could reveal the information about the problems that are faced by the first year students of English Department in learning listening. Furthermore, this research is categorized as descriptive qualitative research. The subject in this research was the students of English Department STKIP PGRI West Sumatera. Meanwhile, the participants of this research were 26 students who were studying in their first year at English Department. Those 26 students were chosen by using simple random sampling technique. In collecting the data, the researcher distributed the questionnaires that consisted of the indicators about students’ problems in listening comprehension to the participants. Then, the researcher interviewed some of the participants in order to collect some additional information. Therefore, in listening comprehension the first year students of English Department STKIP PGRI West Sumatera faced some problems. The problems are they could not understand fast natural native speech, they have to listen to the recording more than once, problems related to the listening material, problems related to the speaker, and problems pertaining to physical settings.
ABSTRAK
Penelitian ini bertujuan untuk mengetahui masalah masalah yang dihadapi oleh mahasiswa dalam listening comprehension. Pelaksanaan penelitian ini dapat menemukan informasi tentang apa saja masalah yang dihadapi oleh mahasiswa tahun pertama jurusan Bahasa Inggris dalam belajar listening. Lebih lanjut, penelitian ini adalah penelitian deskriptif kualitatif. Subject dalam penelitian ini adalah mahasiswa jurusan Bahasa Inggris di STKIP PGRI SUMBAR. Sedangkan yang menjadi partisipan adalah 26 mahasiswa tahun pertama jurusan Bahasa Inggris yang ditentukan menggunakan teknik simple random sampling. Dalam mengumpulkan data, peneliti menyebarkan angket yang berisi indikasi indikasi dari permasalahan dalam listening comprehension kepada para partisipan. Kemudian, peneliti melakukan wawancara terhadap para partisipan untuk mengumpulkan beberapa infromasi tambahan. Dalam listening comprehension, mahasiswa tahun pertama jurusan pendidikan Bahasa Inggris STKIP PGRI Sumatera Barat menghadapi beberapa masalah, yaitu; tidak bisa mengerti pengucapan native speaker yang cepat, harus mendengarkan lebih dari satu kali, masalah – masalah terkait materi listening, masalah terkait pembicara, dan masalah - masalah terkait kondisi fisik sekitar.
Key words : Listening problem, Students’ problem, Listening comprehension
INTRODUCTION
As a human, people are expected to listen more than to speak because by listening, someone can learn how to understand people. This makes listening skill is pretty crucial to be learned by the students especially by the students who is learning the foreign language. In a communication, misunderstanding can be happened when a person could not catch the meaning or the point of what the other person has said. That is why students’ listening comprehension is one of the most important skills that needs more attention.
However, based on the researcher’s pre interview with some of the second semester students of English Department STKIP PGRI West Sumatera, the researcher found some difficulties that they face in listening comprehension. The first was the different accent and pronunciation of the native speakers. The students often get confused when they were listening to a text or passage, and there came a word that is pronounced with different way by the native speaker.
The second problem was noise. Sometimes there were some problems related to the noise that might occur in listening comprehension activity, like the quality of the recording, the classmates that were making sounds, and also the environment around the listening comprehension activity took place that was noisy.
Related to the background of the problem above, the researcher formulated the problem as “What are the problems that are faced by the students during listening comprehension activity at first year students of English Department STKIP PGRI West Sumatera in academic year 2015/2016?”
REVIEW OF RELATED LITERATURE Definition of Listening
Listening is a process of understanding the sounds that is being heard. The listeners do not only need to hear the sounds, but they also need to understand it, and then process the information that is spoken by the speaker. Similarly, Nunan (2003:24) defines listening as an active, purposeful process of making sense of what we hear. Nunan also mentioned that as people listen, they process not only what they hear, but also connect it to other information they already know. After the sounds and information being heard by the listeners, they need to connect that information to other information they already know.
As they find any connection between what they are listening and what they have known before, the listeners will understand about what they have listened.
Listening Process
In listening, there are some processes that should be done by the listeners. Nunan in Richards and Renandya (2002:239) classifies the process of listening into two processes as follow:
a.
Bottom-up processAccording to this view, phonemic units are decoded and linked together to form words, words are linked together to form phrases, phrases are linked together to form utterances, and utterances are linked together to form complete, meaningful texts.
b.
Top-down processThe listener actively construct (or, more accurately, reconstruct) the original meaning of the speaker using incoming sounds as clues. In this reconstruction process, the listener uses prior knowledge of the context and situation within which the listening takes place to make sense of what he or she hears.
Listening Comprehension
In listening processes, the listeners need to comprehend the information they have listened in order to understand the meaning of that information.
As Rizvi (2005:70) states that listening comprehension is the act of understanding oral message. Oral message that have been caught in listening process needs to be understood and comprehended so the message will be meaningful
information. In addition, English learners need to have good listening comprehension in order to get good achievement in listening course. Students with good listening skill comprehension will be able to participate more effectively in communicative situations.
Problems in Listening Comprehension
In listening comprehension, many learners face some problems to understand the speakers’
speech. On his research, Hamouda (2013:124) mentioned some factors that can cause students listening comprehension problems as follow:
1. Problems related to the listening materials.
The content of the listening material can create problems for the listeners in listening comprehension. The students often find it is difficult to understand listening texts with too many familiar words including jargons and idioms, and also the listening texts that have unfamiliar topics.
2. Basic linguistic problems perceived by learners It is difficult and surprising for the students to deal with colloquial language and slang. It is also difficult for them to understand reduced forms like the words ‘I will’ that is reduced into ‘I’ll’.
When encountering an unknown word, the students also stop listening and think about the meaning of the word.
3. Listening problems caused by the failure to concentrate
When the students have got an expected answer in their mind, the students tend to lose focus as they are thinking about that answer. The students can also lose their concentration if the recording is in a poor quality.
4. Listening problems related to psychological characteristics.
The psychological condition of the learners can influence their listening comprehension. The students often feel nervous and worried when they do not understand the spoken text. Even before doing listening comprehension tasks, the students fear that they will not understand what they will hear.
5. The listener
The problems in listening comprehension can also be influenced by the listener himself.
Usually it is difficult for the students to quickly remember words or phrases they have just heard.
The students also find it is difficult for them when listening to English without transcripts.
6. The speaker
The students often get some problems to understand the meaning of words which are not pronounced clearly. It is also difficult for them to understand the listening text when the speaker does not pause long enough.
7. Problems pertaining to physical settings.
Physical settings means the physical environment condition around the listening comprehension task take place. The students will find it difficult to concentrate into what the speaker says if there are some noises around them.
METHOD OF THE RESEARCH
This study was expected to analyze the students’ problems in listening comprehension class.
Descriptive research is meant to analyze the education problems, in this case students problem in listening comprehension, and to describe these problems sharply an briefly. In this research, the researcher investigated the students’ problems in listening comprehension at first year students of English Department STKIP PGRI West Sumatera in academic year 2015/2016. The researcher took 20%
of the population. It means the researcher took 20%
of the 129 students of English Department STKIP PGRI West Sumatra academic year 2015. It resulted 26 students as the sample of this research. Thus, to choose the sample that would be studied, the researcher wrote each name of the students in a piece of paper, and she rolled them up and put them in four boxes according to the class they were belong to.
Then, the researcher randomly took about six papers from each box. The names that had been picked would be the sample of this research.
However, In this research questionnaire and interview were used as the instruments. In collecting the data for questionnaire section, the researcher distributed the questionnaires to the students. Then, after the students finished filling the questionnaire, the researcher collected all of the questionnaires to be analyzed to get the results of the research so that the research question can be answered. For interview section, before interviewing the respondents, the researcher prepared a list of question. Then, the researcher interviewed each of them by using informal conversational interview. Based on the questionnaires that had been filled by the respondents, the researcher counted the respondents’ choices for each item about the students problem in listening comprehension. After that, the researcher analyzed the result for each indicator and elaborated her analysis toward this result. Thus, possible explanations for certain answers were explored by identifying the participants’ additional answers in interview.
FINDINGS
As a result of this research, the researcher found the answer for the research question that had been stated previously. The researcher found that the students’ problems in listening comprehension are;
can not understand fast - natural native speech, need to hear things more than once, problems related to the listening materials, the speaker, and problems
pertaining to physical settings. The findings are represented by the table below:
Based on the table above, it could be seen that the first year students of English Department STKIP PGRI West Sumatera had some problems in listening comprehension. First, the students find it difficult to understand a fast natural native speech.
The students expect they can listen to a slow recording so that they could catch the important words that are being spoken by the speaker. Second, the students need to hear things more than once. They need to listen at least two or two times to the recording till they can comprehend the spoken language. Third, the students have some problems with the listening material. The students often got difficulties in understanding the some jargons or idioms in listening comprehension. They also often lose their concentration when the text is too long.
Forth, the problems related to the speaker. Most of the speaker did not pause long enough to give space for the students to think about the speech. It makes the students difficult to understand the spoken language as they need some space to think about the words they just listened to or some time to think about the answer for the questions in the test. Fifth, the problems pertaining to physical settings. the students find it difficult to concentrate to the listening
No Students’ Problems in
Listening Comprehension Percentage 1. Problems related to the
listening materials 71.2%
2. Basic linguistic problems
perceived by learners. 60.3%
3. Listening problems caused by
the failure to concentrate 68.1%
4. Listening problems related to
psychological characteristics. 64.6%
5. The Listener 67.3%
6. The Speaker 71.2%
7. Problems pertaining to
physical settings 79.2%
8. Trouble with sound 70.0%
9. Have to understand every
word 65.4%
10. Can not understand fast,
natural native speech 73.1%
11. Need to hear things more than
once 73.8%
12. Difficult to keep up 66.2%
13. Get tired 66.2%
comprehension test when there are noises around them. The noise that came either from the class or from outside the class, could make the students difficult to listen to the recording.
CONCLUSION
The problems that the non-native speakers have in comprehending the spoken language can be various. Based on the research question that was stated in chapter I, the purpose of this research was to find out the students’ problems in listening comprehension at first year students of English Department STKIP PGRI West Sumatera. The research result has allowed the researcher to jump into a conclusion that the problems that were faced by the first year students of English Department STKIP PGRI West Sumatera in listening comprehension are;
can not understand fast - natural native speech, need to hear things more than once, problems related to the listening materials, the speaker, and problems pertaining to physical settings.
The first problem was can not understand fast-natural native speech. The students found it difficult to keep up with the speech when the speaker talks too fast. The second was need to hear things more than once. The first year students of STKIP PGRI West Sumatera found it difficult if they only have chance to listen to the recording only once. The third problem was related to the listening material.
The students often get tired and stop listening when the text was too long and takes long time. The forth problem is related to the speaker, where the speaker often do not pause long enough that makes the students difficult to keep up with the speech. The fifth problem is pertaining to physical settings. It was difficult for the students to concentrate comprehending the spoken language where there was noise around them.
SUGGESTION
Misunderstanding between people is not always caused by the speaker’s inability to choose the words to say, it can also happen because of the listeners’ problems in comprehending the spoken language. Unfortunately, based on the researcher’s research at first year students of English Department STKIP PGRI West Sumatera, they were several problems that might be faced in listening comprehension such as can not understand fast - natural native speech, need to hear things more than once, problems related to the listening materials, the speaker, and problems pertaining to physical settings.
Considering the misunderstanding that would like to be happened because of the problems above, the researcher suggests that the English as
foreign language learners should be used to listen to English. It is also strongly suggested that the institution or the test givers to provide a good physical settings for the listening comprehension lecture. It was found that the majority of the students agreed that noise has become a major problem in listening comprehension. Therefore, It would be better if the listening comprehension lecture is held in a room with sound proof so that it can ease the students during listening comprehension lecture.
The researcher is also suggesting the readers and other researchers to continue this research. The present research needs to be carried out with larger sample because the sample size was still small to generalize an overall conclusion towards the students’
problems in listening comprehension. Moreover, every problem needs a problem solving, so that the researcher hopes that there will be a further research to find out the solutions for the students’ problems in listening comprehension that have been studied previously.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
Alhamdulillahirabbil’alamin. Praise to The Almighty Allah S.W.T and to The Beloved Prophet Muhammad S.A.W. A very special thanks and appreciation are given to the advisors, Sesmiyanti, S.S, M.Pd., and Yola Merina, S.S, M.Hum., who have been kind and willing to give their times, energy, opinions, suggestions, and supports in completing this thesis. The researcher’s appreciation also goes to the contributors, Belinda Analido, M.Pd., Herfina Asty, M.Pd., and Lili Perpisa, S.S, M.Pd., who have given contributions to make this thesis better. Then, the researcher would also like to express her deepest thanks to her family who always give support and motivation in finishing this thesis.
REFERENCES
Nunan, David, ed. Practical English Language Teaching. Mc Graw Hill, n.d
Richards, Jack C and Willy A Renandya, Methodology in Language Teaching; An Anthology of Current Practice. London:
Cambridge University Press, 2002.
Rizvi, M Ashraf. Effective Technical Communication.
New Delhi: Tata McGraw-Hill Publishing Company Limited, 2005.
Hamouda, Arafat. "An Investigation of Listening Comprehension Problems Encountered by Saudi Students in the EL Listening Classroom." International Journal of Academic Research in Progressive Education and Development 2 (2013): 42
