FACTORS THAT CONTRIBUTE TO THE PROBLEMS EFL ...

sounds that are unusual to the L2 listeners. She notes that in English (just as in
other languages), there are sounds which are unusual for foreign listeners, and which they
may therefore fail to distinguish from other similar sound or even fail to hear at all. The
sound / / as in ‘think’ for example does not exist in Amharic. A native Amharic
speaker may not notice at first that it occurs in English and he may simply
assimilate it to the nearest sound familiar to him and say /s/ or /t/. Such sound
used to cause confusions when we learned English as a foreign language at lower
classes. This also has its own impact on listening comprehension and can interfere
with the foreign learner’s proper understanding of spoken English particularly of
those learners who are unfamiliar to the speech of the native speakers.
Underwood asserts that learners who have been left to acquire intuitively more
detailed knowledge through exposure to plenty of native speech are aware of such
problems, and therefore are efficient listeners. From this we can infer that the
learners who maintained familiarity with the spoken features of the target language
are efficient listeners while those students who are not familiar with such features
may fail to understand an oral text.
In the English textbooks of elementary schools of our country, listening
exercises that give our students practice in identifying correctly different sounds,
sound–combinations, stress and intonations are presented in the English textbooks
of primary schools. Such exercises aim at letting the students practice ‘listening for
perception’. But how many of our primary schools have recordings of native
speaker that train the learners to perceive correctly the different sounds, stress,
and intonation patterns of the speech of the native speakers. In reality, many of
such listening practices in our primary schools are not supported with recordings.
This may be one factor that makes the spoken feature of the native speech
unfamiliar to our students. This by itself may be one factor that affects students
listening comprehension.
The other listener factor which causes failure to understand EFL listening
may be the inability of the students to recognize the discrepancy between the
spoken and the written English, which is part of the natural feature of the language.
In Ethiopian case, when a student learns a new word or expression, it is believed
he/she usually learns both its written and spoken form. Furthermore, many
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