Difficulties' Bangla medium students face in listening comprehension in ESL

Abstract

The aim of this study is to investigate core problems in listening comprehension encountered by Bangla medium school students of our country who are learning English as a second language (ESL). This study also tends to give explanation and suggestions to fight against these problems. Therefore, this research paper tends to look into learners attitudes, difficulties, and obstacles in achieving ESL listening comprehension skill. This speak will try to find out following thesis questions; a) What are reasons behind students from Bangla medium education system face more difficulties in listening comprehension, especially in native like discourse, comparatively the other language skills? b) How movies or the videos (not made for the educational purpose, rather for entertainment) can help in improving native like listening skill? The results of the study revealed that students face various difficulties when listening to native English or English’s because of several reasons such as unfamiliar vocabulary, colloquial expression, and different range of accent, speech rate, and learner the obstacle and so on. The research was concluded that students from Bangla medium can improve their listening skill if they with proper training and teaching materials such as language lab, regular listening practice and listening evaluation test at the end of the academic session. This paper also recommended teachers and educational institutes to include speaking and listening skills in their curriculum and teach different listening learning strategies such as; Top-down, Bottom-up, Listening for Answers, Taking Notes, Talking About New Words etc.