Communication barriers in the EFL classroom: is poor listening the culprit that obstructs learning?

ABSTRACT

This study has been conducted with eighty undergraduate EFL students at Qassim University, over a period of six weeks, with forty students each in control and experimental groups. The results from the mixed-method analysis show that the experimental group achieved higher scores in listening skills and general comprehension than the control group. There were, also, four listening difficulties experienced by students namely, lack of time to learn, lack of facilities, lack of mastery of vocabulary, and difficulty with the phonics of English. Communication problems stem not just from widely held misconceptions (such as, that listening skills need no training) but also, from the paucity of institutional training in these skills, particularly in the larger context of Saudi EFL classrooms. To facilitate a more wholesome learning experience for the EFL students, language teachers and course designers need to consider these four listening barriers and adopt feasible methods to overcome them. This can be achieved by training teachers to endorse action research by which they can analyze the problems that students encounter and apply effective teaching implications to overcome them.

KEYWORDS:

• Listening comprehension
• listening barriers
• collaboration
• learning achievement
• listening competence

Acknowledgement

The authors would like to thank the Deanship of Scientific Research at Majmaah University for supporting this work under project number: R-2022-192.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Majed Abdullah Alharbi

Majed Alharbi works as an assistant professor in the Department of English at Majmaah University, Saudi Arabia. He earned his PhD in Language, Literacy, and Sociocultural Studies from the University of New Mexico and his MA TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages) from Murray State University in Murray, Kentucky. His research focuses on second language writing and writers’ agency and voice, discourse analysis, and critical literacy. Currently, Majed teaches upper-level English classes, including advanced L2 writing, L2 pragmatics, and discourse studies.

Arif Ahmed Mohammed Hassan Al-Ahdal

Arif Ahmed Al-Ahdal is a Full Professor of Applied Linguistics in the Department of English Language, Qassim University. He is credited with nearly 50 research papers published in internationally indexed journals. He also has examined many PhD theses and ispresently writing two books on Literary Translation and Applied Linguistics.