Listening to real English: How much do EFL students in Indonesia understand a native speaker’s spoken language?

Abstract

Listening is considered the most significant skill in language learning, but EFL programs at universities in Indonesia provide very limited credits for this skill, i.e. 80 hours all together distributed in three semesters. The purpose of this research was to find out whether this limited number of hours could help EFL students achieve advanced level in listening to authentic English spoken by native speakers. To collect the data 20 students majoring in an EFL program in an Indonesian university were tested with authentic material. The test results showed that the total score obtained by the EFL students was 49.6% in average. Therefore, it can be concluded that the ability of the EFL students in comprehending the authentic language spoken by a native speaker of English was very low. This result suggests that students are to be exposed more to listening practice such as watching movies or listening to podcasts to improve their ability in comprehending language produced by native speakers of English.