Azadeh Nemati - Department of English Language Teaching, Jahrom Branch, Islamic Azad University, Jahrom, Iran
Kamran Qareqani - Islamic Azad University Science and Research Branch
Mohammad Reza FalahatiQadimiFumani - Assistant Professor, Computational Linguistics Research Department, Chairman, Regional Information Center for Science and Technology

This study attempted to investigate the listening comprehension problems of American accent of B.A students of English translation studies. To attain this objective their performance on TOEFL and IELTS (their listening comprehension sections) tests were checked. Further, they received a short open-ended questionnaire to comment on their problems in listening comprehension. Based on the results, the most of the students performed low on both TOEFL and IELTS (listening comprehension) tests. Further, most of the students (21 cases, 52.5%) asserted that their main problem was in ‘identifying words when they listened to an audio file, i.e. they were not used to fast speech’. In all, 16 students (40%) announced that they were ‘weak at vocabulary and colloquial terms’. So, it appeared that students had major problems in listening and in vocabulary and viewed these two elements as the main factors that hindered in the listening comprehension process. Moreover, it was found that 45% (18 cases) of the participants believed that ‘minor attention to listening comprehension practices at the university’ was responsible for their problems in listening comprehension. It appeared that universities should put more emphasis on listening comprehension problems. In fact, listening comprehension problem is a dominant one among language learners (Field, 1998). The findings in this thesis could be useful for language learners as well as language teachers

listening comprehension; accent; TOEFL; IELTS; pronunciation