Challenges Faced by Students in Developing Listening Skills at University

This article discusses the challenges faced by students in developing listening skills at university, including environmental factors, cognitive limits, technology, general distractions, and multitasking. It also provides strategies for developing active listening skills, such as maintaining eye contact, note-taking, reflecting instead of deflecting, and displaying empathy and emotional intelligence. By improving their listening skills, students can enhance their academic performance and interpersonal relationships.

Listening Skills

Table of Contents
INTRODUCTION...........................................................................................................................2
MAIN BODY...................................................................................................................................2
The listening challenges faced by students at university............................................................2
Illustrating how student develop their active listening skills. ....................................................4
CONCLUSION................................................................................................................................5
REFERENCES................................................................................................................................6

INTRODUCTION
Listening is different element than obeying. A person who receives and understands the
information and then chooses not to agree or comply with is known as listening. Listening begins
with hearing a speaker communicating or producing sound to which listener listens to. Listening
is more likely psychological act, listening in the process which done by an individual by the
choice. It is an interpretative action by a person in order to understand and potentially something
to hear which make sense (Krivosheyeva, Shodiyeva and et,al., 2020). Effective listening can
help a person or student to become better in whatever field the person is in. listening also
increases interpersonal relationship and lead to perceive an intelligent individual. Effective
listening can help you to become a stronger public speaker too. This project will indicate all the
challenges faced by an student at university and how to overcome the challenges through active
listening skills.
MAIN BODY
The listening challenges faced by students at university
Students can always cope up with the missing whole speech by having the conversation with a
noisy background in there own languages. Many students cannot transfer that skills easily to
second language. Distractions can include things like noise in background of the class, students
interrupting these distractions limits the ability of listening. The students studying in the
university has to speak in easy way, every word should be clear and sentence should be stressed
so its easily understood. Environmental factors like temperature, room lighting can also effect
listening of the students (Bourdeaud'hui, VannBraak and et,al., 2018). The university rooms have
different ambience than home there lighting, temperature of the room and keep student distracted
from there daily studies. To optimize a study place or any workspace should have bright light
and cool which encourages alertness and more passion towards studying. The activities like
feeling hungry, disorganization, inadequate sleep and lack of preparation for the class can make
it more challenging and difficult to focus effectively. To help students there focus should be
strong as much as possible and make sure to get plenty of night sleep and students should healthy
diet to avoid these limits. Although technology helps in many ways to improve student studying
environment and sometimes it is counted in distraction too. The students feels that they are
multitasking if they are listening to music using headphones during study sessions or else while

online classes. However, multitasking may be a drawback in effective listen although it works
opposite of it, less effective listening. To ensure that which type of listening student is doing he
should give full attention to the study session and try to pause other task and see the different at
the end of the task. sometimes it is difficult to keep up when incoming information overloads.
Teacher of the universities should always slow down while teaching, this will encourage them to
relax and will slow down the discourse, students will also get time to pick essential information
and allow the students to ignore the irrelevant information (Nhat, 2021). Tiredness is due to
listening comprehension passages and these passages should be long overall, they should be
divided into short “chunks” through pause, change in speaker or listener response. This is a fact
that long listening comprehension exercise attracts the leaner's attention and understand the
content mush better at the starting and then it becomes difficult afterwards. Another reason is
Fatigue; the listener sometimes runs out of energy to interpret and absorb the strange sounds and
unfamiliar words. For example, student during the long lecture at the university. This is very
obvious the students will not understand a word if he has not learnt in a listening passage.
Student will also fail to recognize many words which are new for him or he is not sufficiently
familiar to identify or sometimes teachers also speak with a fast stream of speech which makes
effective listening more challenging. Most of students are also not familiar with the expressions
and are not any masters in new words to cope up with these gradually it is a long process.
Sometimes words are linked with knowledge, the lack of knowledge within the listening process
can cause challenge and distraction. The majority of listeners rely on the context for
comprehension; the listeners are often unaware of the unknown sound perception. Students
should practise there pronunciation skills which will help them to identify the sounds they are
hearing. Students have to be attentive and concentrate on every effective sound around them, this
will help them to overcome the trouble of sounds or understand the sound more easily. This
problem is very common among listeners (Syafii , Syukroni and et,al., 2020).Sometimes listeners
also things that everything said is important, specially student usually do not filter the
information more often. This leads to ineffective comprehension, failure and feelings of fatigue.
So, learners need to practice to ignore the information which is irrelevant and which is heard
before. The ability to understand the important and the main message is primarily important for
effective communicative situations. In the classroom learners mostly listen to their teacher's
speech. Teachers have there own accent and a way to speak which is mostly formal or to the

standard variant of British English. Sometimes these kind of language barriers becomes
drawback for a student which indirectly effects there performance and interaction with the
teacher efficiently. Sometimes being visible of speaker is important, as it is related to necessity
for listener-response. In some cases the student can see there teacher teaching which is classroom
but sometimes student takes help online in which they cannot ask question and do not interact
with them. For example, an online session post on internet site (Alzamil, 2021) . This effects
them as student mostly get distracted when they do not understand any topic explained to them.
There is also a situation where the student cannot see the speaker but can respond to them like a
telephonic conversation. Speaker visual is important as there facial expression, eye direction,
gesture, tone etc. contribute a lot in effective listening.
Illustrating how student develop their active listening skills.
Listening skills can be described as the quality that is possessed by an individual in receiving
and capturing the messages that are present in the communication process. It also includes
interpretation of the messages that are there. A successful communication is dependent on
listening skills of an individual. It is also known as a soft skill that is used in facilitating students
in understanding and interpreting all the valuable and relevant information that is provided or
communicated by other people. Listening skills has an important role to play in the success of
students as it helps in enhancing their capabilities and abilities in listening the point of view of
other people along with their different views and perspectives relevant to a topic or a matter. It
enables the students in paying attention on various lectures and other video teachings that are
held in their organisation along with grabbing and catching knowledge and information
(Rashidova, 2019). This knowledge and wisdom that they have acquired are used and
implemented in academics for attaining and gaining higher marks in their academic records. It is
important to adopt various strategies for the students for the main motive and purpose of
improving and increasing active listening skills in them. For the students it is important to have
and maintain a good eye contact with the speaker along with frequently asking questions that are
related or relevant with the content that is going to enhance and improve their understanding of
the content as well as it also ensures and sees that they get the completely relevant content and
matter in an appropriate manner.

The most effective and efficient strategy for the students is that of taking and making notes for
improving and increasing their listening skills and capabilities. The Note-taking is a common
practice that involves and includes writing down or recording all the necessary and relevant
information and data that is taken from various sources and platforms. With the help of process
of note taking and writing, writer needs to record and write the essence and importance of
information so that it can be revised quickly as a result of which the listening skills can be
improved. It is essentially important to have the complete usage of symbols and various short
cuts that will help in maintaining mutual understanding in between the speaker and receiver. The
students need to organise and keep all the necessary and relevant information and data in a very
systematic and an understandable method that is going to assist and help in guiding with their
studying process. Keeping or maintaining an important vocabulary notebook that is going to help
and guide in identifying various meanings for some of the very critical and important words as
they will help in understanding the true meaning of whole sentence. The listening skills has a
very important role to play in the life of the students and this note making practice helps in the
increase of their intelligence and memory skills. Students can also reflect instead of deflecting
that means they can bond with the conversation or show that they are engaged with the other
students. However, sometimes a better approach involves less listening and providing responses
that responses to other listening partners(Longweni and Kroon, 2018). This reflects that student
is genuinely interested in the conversation which they are part of. To listen effectively student
need to keep deflecting to a minimum and should try to reflect more instead. Reflecting involves
answering to the speaker in the form of his own language like “what I am hearing from you is....”
etc. students can also take follow-ups question based on the conversation they are having in
recent. Reflecting also assures that listener is also listening carefully and paying attention and
also helps to correct any misunderstandings. Reflecting allows helps the listener to correct what
he may have misheard. Effective listening is based on empathy and emotional intelligence.
Student can be a good listener when person can display the emotions he is feeling like sad,
happiness, fear and fearful etc. through this listener can express their concern and show concern
through the facial expressions and the way they are talking (Eggenberger, 2021). Empathy can
also be defined putting yourself in some other person's shoes and allow yourself to feel like
speaker at the moment. Although empathy is difficult to achieve by every person and it needs

great deal of concentration and effort but if a person is able to do so. This will enhance the
quality of the interactions and communication at the end.
CONCLUSION
This project can be concluded as Effective listening can help a person or student to become
better in whatever field the person is in. listening also increases interpersonal relationship and
lead to perceive an intelligent individual. Challenges of listening faced by students at the
university can be very effective which includes environmental factor, cognitive limits,
technology, general distraction, multitasking etc. These challenges can be overcome by active
listening skills like empathy, emotional intelligence, knowledge and good eye contact etc.
students can also make notes and maintain important notebook this help then to identify and
guide various meanings of some critical sentences. Students can use these active listening skills
to eliminate the challenges this will make easy living at university and will also help them to
overcome all challenges.

REFERENCES
Books and Journals
Alzamil, J., 2021. Listening Skills: Important but Difficult to Learn. Arab World English Journal
(AWEJ) Volume, 12.
Bourdeaud'hui, H., Aesaert, K., Van Keer, H. and van Braak, J., 2018. Identifying student and
classroom characteristics related to primary school students’ listening skills: A systematic
review. Educational Research Review, 25, pp.86-99.
Eggenberger, A.L., 2021. Active listening skills as predictors of success in community college
students. Community College Journal of Research and Practice, 45(5), pp.324-333.
Krivosheyeva, G., Zuparova, S. and Shodiyeva, N., 2020. Interactive way to further improve
teaching listening skills. Academic Research in Educational Sciences, (3), pp.520-525.
Longweni, M. and Kroon, J., 2018. Managers’ listening skills, feedback skills and ability to deal
with interference: A subordinate perspective. Acta Commercii, 18(1), pp.1-12.
Nhat, N.T.H., 2021. Developing bottom-up listening skills in a Google classroom-based EFL
module. AsiaCALL Online Journal, 12(3), pp.47-57.
Rashidova, N.H., 2019. HOW TO IMPROVE LISTENING SKILLS. Theoretical & Applied
Science, (11), pp.39-41.
Syafii, M.L., Kusnawan, W. and Syukroni, A., 2020. Enhancing listening skills using
games. International Journal on Studies in Education (IJonSE), 2(2), pp.78-107.