Perspectives of EFL Students in Listening: modality: Descriptive Study

Abstract

This descriptive study aimed to find out the perspectives of EFL students in listening at a private school in Ambato, Ecuador. This is a descriptive qualitative research method. Participants were 53 students, 29 females and 24 males from first-year BGU, ages ranging from 15 to 16 years old. The instrument applied was an online survey. The results of this study shows that the difficulties that the students faced in listening comprehension were related to multi-accent records and the pace of the audio from academic material. Besides, the resources they like the most are authentic material with subtitles in English; and the activities they prefer are developing extensive listening tasks, working in groups, kinesthetic activities, and own recordings to better picture their improvement. It is recommended that teachers avoid using the same techniques in listening and start applying the levels of listening which are Listening Only (LO), Reading Only (RO), and Reading while Listening plus listening Only (RLL) to enhance understanding, as well as multi-accent input to stimulate perception, and interpretation, and strengthen the natural speech. This study could help future researchers to find out aspects related to students' perspectives on listening skills, as well as activities, strategies, and material for that ability.