Capturing the EFL Students’ Listening Comprehension Problems

Abstract

Listening is of paramount importance for the language development of EFL students. The objective of the present study was to investigate the listening comprehension problems of the EFL students at Universitas Katolik Indonesia Santu Paulus Ruteng. The researchers applied the survey method in conducting this study. There were 105 EFL students who participated in this study, and the instrument used in collecting the data was the Listening Comprehension Problems Questionnaire (LCPQ). After collecting the data, the researchers used SPSS (Version 26) to analyze the data. The findings of this study revealed that 80.63% of the participants experienced listening comprehension problems due to their limited knowledge of pragmatic expressions used by the speakers in the listening audio materials. Other listening comprehension problems encountered by the participants were related to parsing problems, which covered 59.05%, and perception problems, which covered 50.76%. Taking into account the present study’s findings, it reveals that the students experienced some degree of difficulties in understanding spoken language. Henceforth, further studies on overcoming the difficulties experienced by the students and some strategies applied by them are worth researching in future research.