Difficulties that Students who Learn Turkish as a Foreign Language Encounter During Listening Skills

Year 2017, Volume: 7 Issue: 1, 1 - 17, 01.04.2017

Abdullah Kaldırım Hikmet Degeç

Abstract

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Keywords

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Difficulties that Students who Learn Turkish as a Foreign Language Encounter During Listening Skills

Abstract

Listening skills play an important role in an individual’s communication with others and in their
understanding of the environment. Since it provides a basis for the acquisition of language skills it
is one of the most important learning tools, and because it is frequently used in everyday life and
in the learning process, listening skill is the foreground of foreign language teaching. It is important
for students to understand what they listen to in order that they do not encounter any difficulties
in the language learning process. To ensure success in the environments where the Turkish
language is taught as a foreign language, it is necessary to follow the listening processes of the
students attentively and to identify the problems they face during this process. This study aims to
identify the listening barriers encountered by university students learning Turkish as a foreign
language at level B2, and was designed based on a qualitative research approach and a
phenomenological design. Within the scope of the study, eight students studying at Dumlupınar
University’s TÖMER (Turkish & Foreign Languages Research and Application Center) were
identified as participants. Data were collected through semi‐structured interviews conducted with
students included in the sample, and descriptive analysis technique was applied in the analysis of
the research data. Participants expressed views that they often encountered problems such as
accented speech, frequent use of idioms and proverbs during listening, lack of vocabulary
development, and lack of emphasis and voice intonation during speech. Also, factors that make
listening easy to understand are identified as the other languages they speak, good vocabulary
knowledge, interesting topics, listening to audiovisual elements, and the speaker’s use of gestures
and mimics.

Keywords

Listening difficulties, Listening comprehension, Teaching Turkish as a Foreign Language, Phenomenology

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