Abdullah KALDIRIM & Hikmet DEGEÃ
Listening skills play an important role in an individual’s communication with others and in their understanding of the environment. Since it provides a basis for the acquisition of language skills it is one of the most important learning tools, and because it is frequently used in everyday life and in the learning process, listening skill is the foreground of foreign language teaching. It is important for students to understand what they listen to in order that they do not encounter any difficulties in the language learning process. To ensure success in the environments where the Turkish language is taught as a foreign language, it is necessary to follow the listening processes of the students attentively and to identify the problems they face during this process. This study aims to identify the listening barriers encountered by university students learning Turkish as a foreign language at level B2, and was designed based on a qualitative research approach and a phenomenological design. Within the scope of the study, eight students studying at Dumlup?nar University’s TÖMER (Turkish & Foreign Languages Research and Application Center) were identified as participants. Data were collected through semi?structured interviews conducted with students included in the sample, and descriptive analysis technique was applied in the analysis of the research data. Participants expressed views that they often encountered problems such as accented speech, frequent use of idioms and proverbs during listening, lack of vocabulary development, and lack of emphasis and voice intonation during speech. Also, factors that make listening easy to understand are identified as the other languages they speak, good vocabulary knowledge, interesting topics, listening to audiovisual elements, and the speaker’s use of gestures and mimics.
