Investigating the Effects of Mass Media on Learning Listening Skills

Abstract

This research aims to investigate university students' problems and reasons and find solutions to the problems. The researcher utilized the questionnaire to investigate this kind of problem of 84 Faculty of Foreign Languages (FFL) sophomores from class 20AV01 and conducted paired samples T-test on one of the classes, which consisted of 22 participants in the experimental group within a month. The findings show that FFL sophomores- their listening ability, in general, was lower than expected since a considerable number of them could only understand simple and slow English utterances. The lack of vocabulary and pronunciation knowledge and in respect of speaker factors, "informal language", "fast and instant speech", and "the accents" from the speaker are the main causes of their failure to understand English utterances. The Paired-Samples T-test results revealed a significant difference between the pretest and post-test scores (r=0.529, p<0.001), and on average, the post-test scores were 14.3 points higher than the pretest scores. This finding suggests the importance of vocabulary and pronunciation in English listening and self-study through mass media should be taken into more concern.