EFL teachers’ perception and practice of assessing listening skills assessment, and the challenges they face: secondary schools in west Jimma in focus

Abstract

The purpose of this thesis study was to investigate EFL teachers’ perception and practice of assessing listening skill assessment, and the challenges they face: secondary schools in west Jimma in focus. To achieve this objective, descriptive research design was used. The target population was from eleven secondary schools included in the study. There were totally 122 EFL teachers in those secondary schools and hundred percent of them participated in this study. From those EFL teachers, 100 of them selected for questionnaire through Purposive sampling while 15 for interview and 7 for classroom observation selected through available and simple random sampling techniques, respectively. In such descriptive research design, it was required to collect data from large number of respondents so that questionnaire was used as the main instrument to gather data. Besides, semi structured interview and classroom observation were also used to achieve the methodological triangulation. The statistical tools were used to determine the percentage, average, and variation of responses by using SPSS software v-23. Mixed approach which was the combination of both quantitative and qualitative data analysis method was used to analyze the collected data. The quantitative analyzed data presented in tabular form to show the result and the qualitative data were analyzed thematically in statements. The combined result of the questionnaire and semi-structured interview showed that EFL teachers perceived assessing listening skill as important but boring and time consuming task that is difficult to implement it in a listening period, students did not interested to learn it at all, especially in a large class size. It also indicates that sound disturbance, shortage of time, large number of students, less attention given to listening skills, complex grammatical structure, lack of experience and background knowledge of the EFL teacher, and lack of audio-visual materials with their quality were challenges face EFL teachers to implement listening skills assessment in listening classrooms. Similarly, the result of classroom observation and the questionnaire showed that most of EFL teachers also practice the listening skill activities poorly in the listening classrooms. These major findings of the study suggested that EFL teachers perceived as listening skill of students can be improved through improvement of the other skills in EFL. Hence, listening skill assessment was ignored by the EFL teachers; and due to this, students were also not motivated to learn it at all. Based on the conclusion drown, EFL teachers were recommended to implement listening skill assessment in similar to assessment of other skills for integrated improvement of students’ EFL skill. As media of instruction, the pedagogical implication of implementing listening skill assessment was suggested, especially for EFL teachers. Finally, some suggestions were recommended for a future research on listening skill assessment.