English Listening, Easy or Difficult?


    
By Evi Rani

Nowadays, English become international language and people are required to be able communicate in English. Even thought, many of them take some courses to improve their ability in spoken English. However, English listening is a kind of English skills which is hard to be improved. Why is English Listening so difficult? There must be some reasons.
   (OPINION) The first factor is native speakers. Most students agree that English Listening is difficult to be improved. Both of high school students and college students have the same problem. According to Nanda Tri Herwika, a senior high school student who wanted to take English as her major, the causes did not always come from internal. “External factor like the native speaker can influence the listener,” said her. On the other hand, Mei Dwi Cipta and Novantry Ramadhan, students of senior high school in third grade, agreed that native speakers were difficult to be followed. “The native speakers have different accent with us, so we have difficulties in understanding what they said,” said the other students at the same school with Nanda and Mei, “sometimes it is hard for us to catch what they said because their pronunciation is not too clear.”
(FACT)The second factor is the speed of speech. In the diagram beside, the second factor after native speaker is followed by the speed of speech. The listeners could not catch what the speakers said in high speed clearly. Moreover, if the speakers said too slowly, the listeners would get bored to wait them. According to the data, a quarter number of the respondent stated that they often could not catch what the speaker said because of the speed of speech. There are 25% from 40 respondents who agree that the speed of speech can influence the readers. Moreover, English people and Indonesian people have different speed in speech.

The last factor is that the content. According to Larry M. Lynch, 2005, of the four basic English language skills, reading, writing, speaking and listening, the most difficult to acquire is listening comprehension. It is also the one skill which cannot be "taught". There are four factors which can affect the difficulty of language listening tasks. Here is what they are and how they affect listening comprehension skills. The content includes grammar, vocabulary, and background knowledge assumed. The grammar and structure should be familiar for the listeners. Moreover, the vocabulary belongs to the content.  If more than 10 of the words are unknown, the text has less than a 90% vocabulary recognition rate.
It is clear that the native speakers and the speech of speed are the most problem for listener in English Listening. The listeners can also be a problem that from internal. However, we will not have difficulties in English Listening if we always practice over and over.

1 comments:

Unknown said...

Thank you so much for sharing this with us about the UK law tax… these posts are really helpful and keep us up to date regarding law of the UK…
Write My Essay

Post a Comment