A survey on first-year students’ opinions concerning causes of their low performance in listening in the English II course at Thaksin University, Phatthalung

Abstract

This study attempts to survey Thaksin University’ (Phatthalung Campus) first-year students’ opinions concerning the causes of their low performance in the listening component of the English II course. Two hundred and sixty-four students of the Faculties of Science, Public Health and Sport Science, and Technology and Community Development were chosen as the research subjects. A student questionnaire, the only instrument for gathering the data, was used to explore the students’ opinions by considering six factors that may have caused low listening performance: students’ L2 prior knowledge, students’ motivation, students’ learning strategies, the teachers’ teaching methods,classroom environment, and classroom facilities. The SPSS program was used to analyze the quantitative data while the teaching researcher’s discussion was used to describe the qualitative data. The findings revealed that from the total results or the means of the six factors, the students disagreed with the six factors causing their low listening performance. However, considering the mean of each sub factor, there were other six sub-factors, under the students’ prior L2 knowledge and the students’ learning strategies factors, the students agreed as the causes of their low listening performance. Moreover, the majority of the students, 29.11%, agreed that the native speakers’ rate of speech in the CD-ROM was the other additional factor causing their low listening performance. As a result, the English II course teachers should realize the two factors and additional factor above before the rest of the four factors when teaching listening skills in order to solve the students’ listening problems in the right way