DEALING WITH THE FACTORS INFLUENCING THE LISTENING PROCESS IN TEACHING AND LEARNING FOREIGN LANGUAGES

Аннотация

Listening comprehension is widely considered one of the most complex and underexplored skills in foreign language teaching and learning, yet it is the skill upon which learners most heavily depend for acquiring new language in naturalistic and instructed settings alike. This article examines the principal factors that influence the listening process in foreign language education, organizing them into three broad categories: listener-internal factors such as prior linguistic knowledge, working memory capacity, and affective variables including anxiety and motivation; text-related factors such as speech rate, acoustic clarity, lexical density, and discourse organization; and contextual factors such as the learning environment, instructional design, and the quality of teacher mediation. Drawing on theoretical models of listening comprehension including those proposed by Anderson, Vandergrift, and Field, as well as empirical research conducted in EFL classrooms across Central Asia and beyond, the article argues that effective listening instruction must address all three categories of factors simultaneously, and that teachers who understand the multidimensional nature of listening difficulty are better equipped to design tasks, select materials, and provide feedback that supports genuine comprehension development. Practical implications for EFL instructors in Uzbekistan are discussed throughout.