FACTORS THAT CONTRIBUTE TO THE PROBLEMS EFL ...
FACTORS THAT CONTRIBUTE TO THE PROBLEMS EFL ...
FACTORS THAT CONTRIBUTE TO THE PROBLEMS EFL ...
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Strength of the module<br />
1. The module provides the learners with the opportunity to hear and practice <strong>EFL</strong><br />
listening comprehension.<br />
2. The module gives the learners the opportunity to practice the skills and<br />
strategies of listening, such as, understanding the setting or context,<br />
understanding the central idea, predicting, understanding the structural<br />
organization of a text, ignoring unknown or irrelevant words or details,<br />
understanding implied meaning, and listening for specific information or details<br />
3. The narrators in the listening material are native speakers of English. This<br />
helps to familiarize the learners with the spoken feature of the native speakers’<br />
English.<br />
4. The number of speaker involved in the talk is one, and the seaker presents the<br />
talk in the form of narration. This does not confuse the learners to identify the<br />
speaker unlike those listening activities in which two or more speakers are<br />
involved.<br />
Weakness of the module<br />
1. The listening passage of the module was taken from written discourse so that<br />
the listening activities are almost similar to those of the ‘reading aloud’ (i.e.,<br />
saying words as they are written). As a result of this, the material lost the<br />
natural feature (quality) of spoken English which is characterized by colloquial<br />
language, informal and spontaneously produced conversation. This artificial<br />
nature of the language doesn’t give real life listening practice that must make<br />
the learners familiar to the natural feature of the spoken language.<br />
2. Transforming the written discourse to spoken discourse has also another<br />
disadvantage. (a) With regard to density, the information in the written English<br />
is packed densely when compared with that of the spoken English (Ur, 1984;<br />
Underwood, 1989; McDonough & Shaw, 1993). The density of the information<br />
can interfere with the learners’ listening comprehension. (b) When the two are<br />
compared in reference to syntax: while the spoken language is syntactically<br />
simpler, the written language is relatively complex (Brown & Yule, 1983). Such<br />
complexity can also interfere with the learners’ listening comprehension.<br />
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