A STUDY ON EFL LEARNERS’ FOREIGN LANGUAGE LISTENING AND SPEAKING PROBLEMS Gülten Genç, Emine Kuluşaklı, Savaş Aydın İnönü University (TURKEY) Abstract It is commonly known that learners have a lot of problems while learning a foreign language. Many studies have also shown that they have more difficulties with listening and speaking skills rather than other two skills like reading and writing. Both listening and speaking skills play an important role in daily life and learners use these skills for different purposes. While doing this, they meet some problems and try to overcome these. This study was designed to reveal the problems related to listening and speaking skills experienced by Turkish EFL learners during the language learning process. A total of 220 participants (124 females and 108 males) attending the preparatory classes at a state university in Turkey in 2015-2016 academic year were involved in the study. Two questionnaires were used mainly to seek information about the listening and speaking problems of the students. The results of the study showed that listening problems that the participants experienced are mostly related to message itself, speaker, strategy, and task problems whereas speaking problems are mainly related to participants’ language proficiency, content knowledge, affective and personal factors, and contextual factors. In addition, gender is a significant factor in some sub-dimensions of the listening and speaking problems. According to the results, some implications were given for the EFL learners as well as the teachers and some recommendations were made. Keywords: Foreign language listening problems, speaking problems, foreign language learning. 1 INTRODUCTION Listening plays a vital role in daily lives. People listen for different purposes such as entertainment, academic purposes or obtaining necessary information. As for foreign language learning, listening is of paramount important since it provides the language input (Rost 1994:141-142). Without understanding input appropriately, learning simply cannot get any improvement. In addition, without listening skill, no communication can be achieved (Cross, 1998). Richards (2008) explained that courses in listening and speaking skills had a prominent place in language programs around the world today. Ever- growing needed for fluency in English around the world because of the role of English as the world’s international language had given priority to finding more effective ways to teach English. He also indicated that successful listening can also be looked at in terms of the strategies the listener uses when listening. Goh (2000) offered a cognitive perspective on the comprehension problems of second language listeners. He did this by identifying real-time listening difficulties faced by a group of English as a second language (ESL) learners and examining these difficulties within the three-phase model of language comprehension. Data were elicited from learners' self-reports through the procedures of learner diaries, small group interviews and immediate retrospective verbalisations. The analysis showed 10 problems which occurred during the cognitive processing phases of perception, parsing and utilisation. Five problems were linked to word recognition and attention failure during perceptual processing. There were also problems related to inefficient parsing and failure to utilise the mental representations of parsed input. A comparison of two groups of learners with different listening abilities showed some similarities in the difficulties experienced, but low ability listeners had more problems with low-level processing. In the last part of the article, I highlight the benefits of researching real-time cognitive constraints during listening and obtaining data through learners' introspection, and offer some practical suggestions for helping learners become better listeners. Hasan (2000) reported a study of listening problems encountered in the EFL classroom in the ESP Centre at Damascus University, as reported by the learners themselves. It looked in particular at learner strategies, features of the listening text, characteristics of the speaker, attitudes of the listener, the task to be completed as a result of understanding the text, and the degree of visual or written support for the aural input. The results of the study showed that EFL learners experience a range of Proceedings of ICERI2016 Conference 14th-16th November 2016, Seville, Spain ISBN: 978-84-617-5895-1 8609