EFL Students’ Perception of Listening Skills in Core English and IELTS Subjects: A Study at a State University in Battambang

ABSTRACT


INTRODUCTION
Listening is an important skill for EFL learners to communicate, build relationships, and collaborate in various aspects of life.Of the four talents, listening skills demand particular attention as many students at all educational levels in non-English speaking nations throughout the world believe it to be a challenging skill.Many people learning English as a second language (EFL) find it difficult to retain knowledge from spoken communications, especially when it comes from native speakers.This is unfortunate because learning a new language requires teacher-student contact in the target language.Even when the teacher is not a native speaker, several problems in EFL classes show that many students are always bothered by their poor listening skills.Listening and speaking are critical to success-in school, in jobs, and in life (Palmer, 1953).According to Mr. Hosam, developing passive English skills (i.e., listening) can happen through interaction, where learners discuss and negotiate, and not solely through intensive input (Elmetaher, 2021).Therefore, the study suggested 4Q as the teaching strategy that has the potential to be implemented with different language skills.Other researches show that the Learning Together Technique is more successful than the traditional method in the study because it directs the students to express their thoughts, share their ideas cooperate with his/her friends, ISSN: 2964-285X Journal of ESP in Indonesia Vol. 3, No. 2, July 2024: 125 -134 and encourage them in a relaxed atmosphere (KIRBAŞ, 2017).Referring to the music field, English songs can make the students active in the class, they are interested, so they can do listening tasks well (Utam, 2014).Moreover, music listening skills cover a wide range of activities, from listening to general characteristics to the complex activities involved in various kinds of dictation to attention to finer features such as tone quality and intonation (Karpinski, 2000).
According to the survey of (Alzamil, 2021), most participants thought that speaking and listening were the most important skills to learn, but also thought that listening skills were the most difficult while reading was the easiest in the core English skills.Therefore, in terms of their attitudes to listening, most participants found it difficult to understand while listening to English speakers, mainly when they spoke fast.Most also experienced nervousness about listening to English and felt that it was harder to understand native English speakers.This indicates that participants encountered problems when listening to the English language.Also, there are many ways of practicing listening skills but the traditional ways of listening to and repeating textbook CDs or recordings may not be interesting or realistic examples of communication (Damronglaohapan, 2013).The problem becomes more severe when we realize that listening now includes more than understanding words that are delivered in person (Palmer, 1953).Students themselves sometimes don't exactly know the way to improve their listening skills, students try to listen and understand word by word; students assume failure: students do not have an idea of the listening context; students are not conscious of features of connected speech, word stress, or speed of speech: students are not aware of the listening strategies (Artyushina, 2011).Meanwhile, EFL learners mostly face listening skills in Core English and IELTS subjects.Those courses are different, so it depends on each field.IELTS might be more challenging than Core English listening because we use this test to measure our ability and focus on assessing a test-taker's ability to understand spoken English in various real-world situations.But it doesn't mean that the most challenging one would improve students more than the study for general knowledge.Therefore, there must be provided the different styles or percentages of improvement of students in listening skills.
Using language to communicate is a necessary part of our daily lives.Listening is the psychological process of receiving, attending to constructing meaning from, and responding to spoken and/or nonverbal messages (Tyagi, 2013).Similarly, (Saricoban, 1999) defined listening as the ability to identify and understand what others are saying.Listening is a necessary skill when communicating with others, but due to the lack of real opportunities to listen to and communicate with native speakers, the teachers must provide other learning situations to improve this skill (Damronglaohapan, 2013).Also, listening is the receptive use of language, and since the goal is to make sense of the speech, the focus is on meaning rather than language (Cameron, 2001).By (Hinkel, 2004), "Listening requires learners to pay attention, to focus, to remember, to process information, and to make inferences, which can all contribute to the development of cognitive and social skills".
According to (Wah, 2019), there are seven main types of listening.First, selective listening is the information input to tasks that aims to help students derive specific information from texts, even when the texts themselves are well beyond the student's current level of linguistic and content knowledge.Second, intensive listening is the formal input to tasks that aims at focusing the learner's attention on features of the language system once text meaning has been established to some content.Third, interactive listening is developing appropriate responses and focuses on helping listeners develop awareness of differences in cultural styles of listener feedback and options for providing such feedback.Awareness of listener options and strategies can increase the learners' effectiveness and ease in participating in collaborative discourses.Fourth, discriminative listening serves as the base for all other purposes of listening behaviors and indicates distinguishing behaviors for the auditory and for identifying the auditory and the visual messages.Fifth, listening for comprehension is relevant to the understanding of the information while avoiding critical judgment of the message by assigning the meaning intended by a speaker instead of assigning his/her meaning.Sixth, critical listening is identified as evaluating what is being said and discriminating and comprehending the message to form a judgment about the message to accept or reject the persuasive appeals.The last type is appreciative listening.It is to enjoy or gain a sensory impression from the material.Moreover, to make the conversation go well, there are some techniques to improve listening skills and what good listeners should do (Perez, 2007).First, active listening is the ability to listen to others consciously.Second, expressive communication: the capacity to establish smooth communication and be able to listen to others with interest and to express oneself in an understandable way, both in verbal and non-verbal communication.Third, cooperation refers to the capacity to perform actions on behalf of others.
From the English in Mind book second edition (Puchta, 2011) for listening skills, they use a few materials.Podcasts are audio files that are distributed over the Internet through subscription.Podcasts are usually in the format of an MP3 and can be played on any digital device, such as laptops, tablets, and smartphones.Podcasts are automatically delivered to subscribed users and they can listen to them whenever and wherever they want (Shelly & Frydenberg, 2010) cited by (GONULAL, 2020).Further, podcasts and vodcasts can provide ISSN: 2964-285X Journal of ESP in Indonesia Vol. 3, No. 2, July 2024: 125 -134 authentic, contemporary, culturally rich, and easily accessible materials, which makes them a highly useful and practical language learning resource.Indeed, numerous digital materials are specially designed for ESL and EFL learners on the Internet (GONULAL, 2020).Moreover, according to Brennan cited in (Kurniati, 2017) conversation is a joint activity in which two or more participants use linguistic forms and nonverbal signals to communicate interactively.Dialogues are conversations between two participants.Face-to-face conversation is universally engaged in by all human cultures and provides an interactive context in which children learn their native languages.Conversation can be concluded that using video in teaching listening is a good alternative.On the other hand, video can be easily accessed because it is available in a variety of forms videotapes, DVDs, TV, online video, etc. (Sutrisno, 2020) Therefore, listening to a song over and over can feel less monotonous because the rhythm and melody (Purcell, 1992).When someone listens to English songs, their ears will unconsciously get used to hearing so that when in a listening class, someone who is used to listening to songs will find it easier to get the meaning of what the narrator is saying (Afriyuninda, 2021).According to (Ur, 1999), listening activities are based on a simulated real-life situation and are likely to be more interesting and motivating to do than contrived textbook comprehension exercises.
IELTS is the study program for doing an exam.So, this subject is important for students who want to go abroad.In the IELTS exam, it contains 4 skills, such as reading, writing, listening and speaking.Also, these tasks listed by IELTS 10 (2015) are: Multiple choice items, Short-answer questions, Sentence completion, Note/summary/flow chart/table completion items, Labelling a diagram/plan/map, Classification items, and Matching items (Sabet, 2017).
The Listening test is the same for both Academic and General Training modules.It is in four sections with a total of 40 questions in order of increasing difficulty and will last about 30 minutes with an extra 10 minutes at the end for candidates to transfer their answers to the answer sheet.There are a few techniques for learning IELTS to enhance students' listening skills (Kim, 2014).In the IELTS Listening test, the recording is played once only.A student must, therefore, remember several tips to gain a good score such as understanding the instruction, previewing and predicting, then listening, writing quickly, checking, and rewriting.You are given about 30 seconds after each section to check your answer.At the end, you are given about 10 minutes to transfer your answers from the test booklet onto the answer sheet.
There are 6 types of questions in IELTS such as multiple-choice, completion, matching, classification, labeling, and short answer.Multiple-choice questions are one of the most common question types in the IELTS Listening test.There are two types of multiple-choice, one-answer and multiple-answer.One answer the instruction asks you to choose one best option out of the three or four.You must read the instructions carefully to make sure that you can do the right job choosing the words from the box given or from the recorded text.There are four genres of completion questions such as note completion, summary completion, sentence completion, and table/form completion.Matching types are required to match a numbered list of items from listening text to a set of lettered options on the question paper.There will generally be more possible options than the number of questions and your job is to find the most suitable options for the numbered question.Talking about classification, this question type is like matching, which asks you to classify information given in a recorded text by identifying a letter that represents one of the classifications for each item in a list of questions given.Labeling is a question type that assesses the skill of listening for detail.You are required to understand detailed information to complete some missing information about a diagram such as a piece of equipment, a plan, or a map.Short-answer questions require you to write responses to the list of questions given.Most likely, you will be instructed to give a short answer that is NO MORE THAN THREE WORD AND/OR A NUMBER.If you write four words, your answer is marked as wrong.Also, the spelling must be correct.
As stated in a coursebook written by (Kim, 2014) there are 3 types of speech in IELTS coursebook which are one person, two people, and more people.For one person, each of the four sections of the IELTS Listening test focuses on a different type of speech, and the number of speakers will change accordingly.Generally, a talk or short speech on a general topic in Section 2 and an academic lecture in Section 4 will be spoken by only one speaker in these sections.The main problem for you is the content of the talk, which usually uses more academic vocabulary and more abstract ideas.About two people, a social or transactional dialogue that may be found in Section 1 of the test usually involves two speakers.You may find this speech more demanding because you must remember who has said what to be able to produce correct answers to the questions.About more people, A conversation in an academic context in Section 3 usually involves two to four speakers.Candidates may find this more challenging because it is not easy to identify who says what.
This research tries to explore the following questions:

Research Design
To find the answers to the three research questions outlined in the introduction, this study used a quantitative research method with a survey design.The reason for choosing this design is to know the number of students whose opinion of IELTS or Core English subjects must improve (Činčala et al., 2023).For this research, the participants are selected from year 3 up to year 4 on both weekends and weekdays of English major in NUBB.There is a class on the weekend and a class on weekdays for year 3.There is also a class on the weekend in year 4. So, the total number of participants is 92 students.There are 65 female students and 27 male students.The research sampling is purposive.There are two conditions for choosing the participants.Firstly, students who are available and have learned Core English and IELTS will be selected as the participants of the study for this research; therefore, this research employs a purposive sampling method.Secondly, those learners must be students at the National University of Battambang majoring in English.

Instruments
The tools for gathering the data for research are survey questionnaires which include scales such as strongly agree, agree, neither agree or disagree, disagree, and strongly disagree.Researchers develop this questionnaire by using only 6 types of listening such as selective listening, intensive listening, comprehension listening, critical listening, interactive listening, and discriminative listening written by (Wah, 2019).Then researcher developed survey statements based on specific meaning of each listening type.This survey questionnaire was used to pilot for improvement and ensure reliability.These types of questions help the researchers to clarify the perception of the students who are majoring in English literature how they think of IELTS and Core English.These questionnaires would help the students think deeply about how these subjects improve them the most.
The activities of collecting data by using online surveys through Google Forms.The survey divided into 3 parts such as background information, listening skills in Core English, and listening skills in IELTS.In each part, there are a few more questions for students to select whether they agree or disagree to show their thoughts on these two subjects.Moreover, there are five choices for measuring their agreement of the researcher questionnaires such as, strongly agree, agree, neutral, disagree and strongly disagree.

Procedures
Researchers upload all information of questionnaires in Document files into Google Forms for doing surveys online.After uploading the questionnaires to Google Forms, researchers will go through the class and do the survey.There are a few steps for collecting the data.
1. Researchers contact the class monitor of year 3 and year 4 to ask for the available time for researchers to do the survey.2. After finding the available time, researchers would ask for permission from the teacher of that course to do the survey.3.For that survey, all researchers will be involved with students in the classes.4. First, researchers explain the purpose of conducting this survey to students.Then, researchers will send questionnaires through Google form to class monitors via telegram, to let her forward to all students in the class.Also, while students are doing the survey, all researchers will stay still and explain to them whether they don't understand any points.Finally, the researchers receive the data and use it for analysis.

Data analysis
After receiving all the answers from the students, the first step is researchers must read all the answers that the responder provides.Then researchers will take notes one by one list them down and divide them into each scale.After finding the results of the perception of students on Core English and perception of IELTS, researchers will compare those results to see which one is the best choice for responders by using Microsoft Excel.Data analysis must include methods of computing, and the program used Microsoft Excel and SPSS for calculating the percentage and number of respondents.

How teachers demonstrate listening
Table1 shows the survey results on listening skills demonstrated by classroom teachers in two regular ways comprising using audio and reading for listening in Core English.Types of listening are also displayed in different tables with percentages.As can be seen in Table 1 there are 74 % of total participants agree that teachers played audio for listening during their teaching while only 4.4% of total participants disagree.Therefore, there is 41.3% agreement that teachers read the tapping script while listening; however, 17.4% disagree with the statement above.

Table1. Teachers
This analysis show that teacher mostly read the tap script for students while doing listening practices based on the answers from students in the survey.
Table2 states that the survey results on listening skills in Core English to know the perception of students on types of listening.As can be seen in Table 3 there are 79.1 % of total participants agree that teachers played audio for listening during their teaching while only 2.2% of total participants disagree.Therefore, there is 53.9% agreement that teachers read the tapping script while listening; however, 9.9% disagree with the statement above.
The analysis reveals that in IELTS subject, teachers mostly play audio listening during teaching based on the result from the survey.Listening to the recording of speech with a noisy background.6.5 23.9 33.7 31.5 4.3 30.4 35.8 The data in Table 4 shows 63.1 % of participants agreed that listening to the song to appreciate the lyrics can help to improve their listening skills, and only 4.3 % of participants disagree with it.69.5% of participants approved that practicing listening by listening to stories to understand the main points could strengthen their ISSN: 2964-285X Journal of ESP in Indonesia Vol. 3, No. 2, July 2024: 125 -134 listening skills.In contrast, 5.4% of participants argued with that statement.Moreover, practicing listening to recorded messages to note important information was accepted by 68.5% of participants but was rejected by 4.3 % of participants.Therefore, 67.4% of participants supported that practicing listening skills in core English will help improve grammar but 4.3% of participants objected to it.Furthermore, 69.5% of participants consented to listening skills will gain participants vocabulary ability.Nevertheless, 5.4% of participants thought that practicing listening skills wasn't useful.72.8% agreed that practicing listening skills will help improve pronunciation but 6.5% of participants didn't agree with it.There were 52.5 % of participants agreed that listening to the storytelling and retelling using their own words will enhance their comprehension listening, while 9.8% of participants thought that this activity didn't improve them at all.66.3% of participants did agree that listening to the conversation and answering the comprehension questions will boost their ability in comprehension listening.Yet 3.3% of participants disagreed with that.Besides, listening to mono audio about the specific topic and summarizing information was supported by 52.2 % of participants but 4.3 % didn't agree with this.Additionally, 70.6% of participants agreed that practicing listening and analyzing TRUE or FALSE statement exercises helps participants to develop their listening skills, whereas only 2.2% of participants disagreed.Further, 72.8% of participants went along with the statement that listen and correct the mistakes in the statements in listening questions but 1.1% rejected this statement.By contrast, practice listening by listening and answering the questions was assented to by 75% of participants but there is only1.1% of participants disagreed with that.54.3% of participants agree that online application listening exercises involving participation in conversation can boost their ability in listening skills, but 3.3% of participants opposed this idea.Still, 53.2% of participants side with practice by responding to the question immediately after listening to the audio, unlike 9.8% of participants.51% of participants granted that listening to a short storytelling and continuing the story is likely to build on participants' ability in listening skills, and 12% of participants denied this idea.Furthermore, 61.9% of participants agreed that practicing listening to the tone of voice can help to predict the situation in discriminative listening but 7.6% of participants thought it isn't improved at all.And 55.4% of participants admitted that listening to the pitch of an instrument can help participants predict the instrument.Whereas 3.3% of participants disagreed with the statement above.35.8% of participants agreed that listening to the recording of speech with a noisy background could improve their listening ability but only participants about 30.4% disagreed that listening to the recording of speech with a noisy background could upgrade them.
This analysis interpreted that student mostly chose selective listening, intensive listening and critical listening as the main types of listening to improve their listening abilities.Therefore, not many students preferred comprehension listening, interactive listening and discriminative listening as the tools for them for improving their ability.

Discussion
According to the objective research and the data in the table above, researchers found out that these results align with the statement from English in Mind book 4 by Puchta et al. (2011) and English in Mind book by Puchta et al. (2012).Based on the content of the books, it shows that all types of listening such as selective listening, intensive listening, comprehension listening, critical listening, discriminative listening and interactive listening are all including in the books.So, students can apply all types of listening in their studying.Related to the results of the research, there are more percentages of participants chose the agree option related to the practice in types of listening exercises in Core English which researchers conducted in the survey questions.In contrast, there are fewer percentages of participants who chose the disagree options related to the practice in types of listening exercises in Core English.As can be seen from the data above, the perception of IFL students shows that studying Core English subjects greatly improves their listening skills.
These results align with the statement from (Kim,2014) IELTS book show that this book helps students to master their listening skills by practical step-by step in effective way.Moreover, it helps students to bring success to the coming IELTS test.And from the survey of this research, there are less percentages of participants who rejected the questions that reveal their thoughts of studying IELTS subject can enhance their listening skills.However, most participants thought that practicing exercise in IETLS would help them to be better with their listening skills.So, it can be concluded that studying IELTS subjects improves listening skills.
Most participants prefer IETLS rather than Core English for learning and practicing listening skills.So, researchers can conclude that studying IELTS is a more effective way to improve their listening skills.According to Wah (2019), his research is talking about Teaching Listening Skills to English as a Foreign Language Students through Effective Strategies.The research result showed that Students accepted that their listening ability improved because of listening practices and activities in class.They described that listening strategies and skills are important in English classes and the listening strategy and skill training in their class helped to improve their listening ability.That research also includes 7 types of listening such as selective ISSN: 2964-285X Journal of ESP in Indonesia Vol. 3, No. 2, July 2024: 125 -134 listening, intensive listening, interactive listening, discriminative listening, listening for comprehension, appreciative listening, and critical listening (Wah, 2019).Moving back to this research, the researchers have adapted the types of listening from (Wah, 2019) to find out the perception of NUBB students about listening skills related to two subjects which are Core English and IELTS.Researchers used only 6 types of listening which include in Core English and IELTS subjects for collecting data such as selective listening, intensive listening, interactive listening, discriminative listening, listening for comprehension, and critical listening.After surveying and analyzing the data, the researchers have found that both subjects have improved students' listening skills but the most effective one for them is the IELTS subject, based on the data.According to Afriyuninda, the use of English songs improves English students 'listening skills.they can also practice good and correct pronunciation and can learn new vocabulary by practicing listening to English songs to improve their skills (Afriyuninda, 2021).Also, it was easier for them to memorize the pronunciation of these words by singing a song.A research on the topic of students' listening habits in English conversation and vocabulary mastery, the result that the people listen in conversation influences how many new words or vocabulary they can master, every activity in conversation wherever it happens, we listen to some new vocabulary so we can reproduce of vocabulary because when they are listen conversation automatically they are get some vocabulary, try to understand the purpose of the conversation and find the meaning in other sources (Kurniati, 2017).Reflecting on the researcher's result, the survey shows that most participants prefer listening to songs and conversations as the audio for listening practices.So, there is no difference between either researcher.

CONCLUSION
EFL learners in Cambodia are non-native of English language learners; therefore, listening to audio that is spoken by native speakers is hard for them to comprehend English the listening.However, students do try their best in listening skills.They practice listening in various ways such as using podcasts, vodcasts, songs, conversation audio, interview audio, etc.According to the research's results, researchers found that studying Core English can help participants to improve their listening skills.The most improvement is critical listening and then selective and intensive listening.Moreover, studying IELTS also help participants enhance their listening skill as Core English on the same types of listening.Even though, the researchers found out that Core English and IELTS subjects can help students to improve their listening skills, but the most improved one is the IETLS subject.Based on this research results, among 6 types of listening, there are 4 types of listening skills such as intensive listening, critical listening, interactive listening, and discriminative listening in IELTS that participants highly agreed with those types of listening really helped them improve their listening ability comparing to Core English subject.These results are only focused on students from the major of English Literature in the research context without generalizing the results elsewhere.Moreover, future researchers may employ different research design and add more respondents to minimize research gaps.Also, teachers can use this research to practice with students to improve their listening skills and students can use this research information to fulfill their listening skills.Moreover, researcher found that few types of listening skills in IETLS and Core English are not really help students with their listening abilities such as comprehension listening, interactive listening and discriminative listening.So, to helps students to be more intelligent, teachers should find out some method that related to those 3 types of listening and asks students to practice it more ask they can even though they are good at selective listening, intensive listening, and critical listening.Therefore, authors can use this research to develop their textbooks.

Table 2 .
The perception of students on types of listening in Core English subject Journal of ESP in Indonesia Vol. 3, No. 2, July 2024: 125 -134 Journal of ESP in Indonesia Vol. 3, No. 2, July 2024: 125 -134

Table 3 .
Teacher demonstrates listening

Table 4 .
The perception of students on types of listening in IELTS subjects