Difficulties faced by the first-year non-major English students when learning listening skills: a case study at Hanoi Open University

Tóm tắt

This study is an attempt to reveal the non-major English students’ perception of the role of English listening skills and find out the difficulties that they frequently face while learning English listening comprehension; apart from that, some solutions are suggested. Mixed methods are used to conduct this study. The data were collected from 90 first-year nonmajor English students and 5 teachers of English at the Faculty of Economics, Hanoi Open University. The data were analyzed both quantitative and qualitative methods which include the data from survey questionnaires for students and interview questions for teachers. The results indicated that most of the students had positive awareness towards the role of English
listening skills and the listening comprehension difficulties came from the physical setting and listeners/learners themselves. The paper also gives some suggestions for teaching and learning English listening skills for first-year non-major English HOU students in general and at the Faculty of Economics in particular. Hopefully, this study, to some extent, is very useful for teachers and students of English in the process of teaching and learning English listening skills.