EFL Teachers’ and Learners’ Practices of Teaching and Learning Listening Skills and Challenges They Encounter: Seka Secondary School, Grade Ten in Focus

Abstract

This study was conducted to investigate EFL Teachers’ and Learners’ practices of teaching and learning listening skills and challenges they encounter in grade ten EFL classroom. This research was a descriptive study. Moreover, the current researcher employed both the quantitative and qualitative methods. The subjects of the study were 132 randomly selected grade ten students and all grade ten English Teachers of Seka Secondary in 2020/2021 academic year. Data was gathered by means of questionnaire, interview and observation. Data obtained through questionnaires were organized and analyzed quantitatively while data gathered through interview and observations were analyzed qualitatively. The findings indicated that difficulty in understanding of the spoken text was due to limitation of English proficiency, lack of opportunities to use and to practice English listening skill, inability to understand native pronunciation and poor teaching and learning habits. Moreover, it was found out that the speed of the speaker, length of the text, less quality of recording materials were problems students and teachers encountered in teaching and learning listening skills. Most of the students felt that it was quite difficult to understand listening text since it contained unfamiliar words in it. On the basis of the findings, ways of solving the problems such as applying active teaching learning method during listening lesson in classroom, familiarizing students with native speaker accent (pronunciation), using appropriate teaching and learning listening techniques, giving opportunities to practice of teaching and learning listening skills and the like were recommended