چكيده به لاتين
The objectives of this study were to (a) investigate the perceptions and problems of undergraduate students of Engineering in the academic listening course at the Iran University of Science and Technology (IUST) and (b) to explore their viewpoints about the importance of academic listening tasks and their preferences for the listening tasks. The participants were 199 Iranian undergraduate students of Engineering (Male = 147; Female = 52) at the IUST. The instrument was a questionnaire with 40 items, which was developed by the researchers. The first section with eight items explored learners’ attitudes towards academic listening, the second section with 20 items examined their problems in academic listening, and the last section with 12 items investigated learners' preferences for various academic listening tasks. An interview with 3 open-ended questions about their perceptions, problems, and the preferred tasks in the academic listening course was also conducted .Considering learners’ attitudes, both male and female learners reported that (a) they were aware of the perceived importance of academic listening, (b) they found it difficult to understand the spoken text not interesting to them, and (c) they found that listening comprehension was exciting. With regard to problems, both male and female learners reported that insufficient vocabulary, speed of speech, poor quality of recordings, long texts, and unfamiliar topics, respectively were their major listening problems and the results of the study for the listening tasks in the academic listening class revealed that male students considered the following tasks important, respectively: listening to news reports, listening to academic interview, listening to academic discussion, listening to announcement, and listening to conversation ,while female learners found the following tasks important ,respectively: listening to academic interview ,listening to seminars and presentations, listening to academic discussion, listening to news reports, and listening to announcement. EGAP instructors are recommended to consider undergraduate students’ preferences and viewpoints about the academic listening in their listening classes.
