University Student Use and Perception of Listening Comprehension Strategies: The Case of Online EMI Lectures

Literature Review

Several studies have attempted to examine the listening difficulties English language learners struggle with. For example, Wang and Fan (2015) examined the listening difficulties faced by low-proficiency Chinese learners of English as a foreign language (EFL). Results from a 38-item questionnaire and semi-structured interviews revealed that the teachers and learners shared the view that bottom-up processing difficulties, such as decoding and word recognition, represent the most serious challenge for the low-level EFL learners. Hence, the authors recommended helping low-proficiency EFL learners to overcome their bottom-up processing difficulties before encouraging them to use more top-down processing strategies.