A STUDY ON EFL LEARNERS’ FOREIGN LANGUAGE LISTENING AND SPEAKING PROBLEMS

It is commonly known that learners have a lot of problems while learning a foreign language. Many studies have also shown that they have more difficulties with listening and speaking skills rather than other two skills like reading and writing. Both listening and speaking skills play an important role in daily life and learners use these skills for different purposes. While doing this, they meet some problems and try to overcome these. This study was designed to reveal the problems related to listening and speaking skills experienced by Turkish EFL learners during the language learning process. A total of 220 participants (124 females and 108 males) attending the preparatory classes at a state university in Turkey in 2015-2016 academic year were involved in the study. Two questionnaires were used mainly to seek information about the listening and speaking problems of the students. The results of the study showed that listening problems that the participants experienced are mostly related to message itself, speaker, strategy, and task problems whereas speaking problems are mainly related to participants’ language proficiency, content knowledge, affective and personal factors, and contextual factors. In addition, gender is a significant factor in some sub-dimensions of the listening and speaking problems. According to the results, some implications were given for the EFL learners as well as the teachers and some recommendations were made.