Exploring Engineering Students’ Challenges of Listening to Academic Lectures

Academic listening has been ignored for a long time in universities and academic contexts [31], leading toundergraduate students’ problems in their academic listening activities including lecture comprehension. However, atthe Iran University of Science and Technology (IUST) a course on academic listening is being offered to undergraduatestudents of Engineering containing numerous academic listening tasks. One of the objectives of the course is to improvestudents lecture comprehension. The purpose of this study was to find the Engineering students’ problems and theirreasons and solutions in solving their problems in lecture listening. The participants of the study were Iranianundergraduate students of Engineering (N=94) at the Iran University of Science and Technology. An interview withthree open-ended items was used for data collection. The results showed that the most problems reported by thelearners were knowing insufficient vocabularies and the speed of delivery. The participants’ reasons for their problemsin listening to lectures were found to be knowing insufficient vocabularies, having insufficient practice, unfamiliaritywith strong accents, and having difficulty in concentration. Considering solutions suggested by the learners, practicinglistening skill, expanding the vocabulary knowledge, watching films, concentration during listening, taking notes, andincreasing prior knowledge received the highest frequency, respectively.

Keywords:

academic listening , lecture , lecture listening problems , reasons and solutions for solving lecture listening problems , accent , speed of delivery