Investigating The Students’ Challenges in Extensive Listening Class

Abstract

Listening is one of the most important skill that must be mastered in learning a language. One way that learners can do to master their listening skills by doing Extensive Listening. Renandya (2012) states that Extensive Listening can produce some benefits for English as a Foreign Language (EFL) students such as how to process the spoken language more accurately and fluently. This present study attempts to investigate the listening challenges encountered by English Language Education (ELE) Program students at Universitas Kristen Satya Wacana. Ten students from batches 2015 and 2016 who have taken Extensive Listening classes in the second semester of their first year were selected to be the participants of this present study. The data of this research were taken from the interviews done to the students. This present study shows that students feel speeches from the listening audios were too fast, and the utterances that the students listened were regarded as too complex. In addition, word boundaries were found to be blurry by the students. Also, the students’ challenges may occur because the speech had to be processed in a real time. Those were the major listening challenges encountered by ELE Program students. The findings of the study are expected to be useful for listening teachers. It is hoped that the teachers become more aware of the challenges faced by the students and later can help the students to deal with the challenges in Extensive Listening class.