A comparison of EFL teachers' and students' perceptions of listening comprehension problems and teachers' reported classroom practices

This study aims to explore teachers’ perceptions of university level students’ listening comprehension problems, who learn English as a Foreign Language (EFL), in order to compare them with the students’ perceptions, as well as to probe into teachers’ reported classroom practices to deal with these listening comprehension problems. With this aim, the study was carried out with 423 B1.2 level EFL learners and 49 teachers in Turkey. First, the participating teachers were asked to list B1.2 level students’ listening comprehension problems, and then both teachers and students were given a 30-item questionnaire with 5 sub-categories related listening comprehension problems: message, task, speaker, listener and strategy use. In addition, 12 teachers, who were chosen by considering the results of the quantitative data, were interviewed in order to explore how teachers help their students to overcome their listening comprehension problems.The results of the quantitative data revealed that several items in each subcategory of the questionnaire showed statistically significant differences. Except for one item, teachers’ mean scores were always higher than students’ mean scores, which indicate that students do not experience these listening comprehension problems as frequently as their teachers think and teachers may be more aware of these listening comprehension problems than their students. The analysis of the interviews revealed that, all of the participating teachers considered listening as a very important skill for their students. In addition, it is found that although teachers have different perceptions among themselves and have different years of experiences, when their reported classroom practices are considered, they perform similarly in the classroom in order to help their students to overcome their listening comprehension problems.