FACTORS THAT CONTRIBUTE TO THE PROBLEMS EFL ...

problem. She says that perception of sounds is made difficult by the different
pronunciations of words across versions of the same language (e.g. British, Indian,
Pakistani, Canadian, Australian, and regional U.S Englishes). She further states
that sound perception is also made difficult by the different rhythms and tone
patterns in the L2 compared with the rhythms and tone patterns in the students’
native language.
The other problem that makes difficult to understand the native speaker
English may be the learners past experience of learning. Here the researcher tries
to mention his own past experience of EFL learning in high schools. As a student,
for example, the spoken feature of English to which we were accustomed to be
was to our teacher’s speech which was characterized by over clear enunciation
(intelligible pronunciation) and slow rate of delivery. The reason why teachers
make use of these strategies was in order to make their message more clear to
their students. When students who are accustomed to their teacher’s accent, come
across the pronunciation of the native speakers characterized by fast rate of
delivery, unstructured language with incomplete sentences, and false starts, and
hesitations; it may be difficult for them to understand the EFL listening text. Yagang
(1994:190) describes it as follows:
Learners tend to be used to their teacher’s accent or to the standard variety
of British or American English. They find it hard to understand speakers with
other accents. Spoken prose, as in news broadcasting and reading aloud
written texts, is characterized by an even pace, volume, pitch, and intonation.
Natural dialogues, on the other hand, are full of hesitations, pauses, and
uneven intonation. Students used to the former kinds of listening material may
sometimes find the latter difficult to understand.
This seems the reason why Underwood (1989) criticizes the use of non-authentic
texts instead of the authentic one for the teaching of listening. She says that using
non-authentic texts for listening causes students to pose an additional problem of
having to try to transfer what they have learned by listening to non-authentic
materials to their attempts to understand authentic speech.
According to Ur (1984), authentic feature of English (which exist in real-life
listening) is characterized by colloquial, spontaneous and informal conversation,
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