Listening Comprehension Problems of FL Learners in a Peer Interactive, Self-Regulated Listening Task

Abstract

It is vital to understand the listening problems students face in a foreign language (FL) classroom. In the current study, students were provided with options to identify these problems. Twenty-eight A1 level Turkish secondary school students worked in pairs and had autonomy to control the audio while listening. While dialogic exchanges illustrated articulated listening comprehension problems in a natural and observable way, self-control data enabled the researcher to observe how students chose to operate the input after encountering such difficulties. Students mostly experienced problems related to process, listener, affect, and input, followed by social- and task-related problems. The most frequent problems were mental translation, inability to chunk streams of speech and difficulty keeping pace with the delivery. In terms of self-controlling the input, students operated the audio mainly to check understanding and catch up with the speed of speech. With the help of these valuable data, the current study aims to highlight the possible benefits of peer interaction by portraying how students experienced and shared the mental, affective, and social processes involved in listening.