e-ISSN : 2620 3502

International Journal on Integrated Education

p-ISSN : 2615 3785

The main difficulties in learning a foreign language

Sharipova Feruza Negmatulloyevna1
1
English teacher of the department of “Foreign languages” of Bukhara Engineering
Technological Institute, Uzbekistan
Email: [email protected]

ABSTRACT
This article discusses some of the difficulties in understanding foreign speech in listening. The
perception and understanding of speech is a very complex mental activity and listening is by no means an
easy type of speech activity. The acquisition of a foreign language and the development of speech skills is
carried out mainly through listening. Therefore, listening should be developed better than other skills, but
in fact, listening causes the greatest difficulties.
Keywords: listening, speech activity, methodological system, communication, learning process.

1. INTRODUCTION
Listening is one of the most difficult types of speech activity, it is not an easy speech activity. The
most significant difficulty in listening is the lack of an ability for the auditor to regulate activities.
Listening is the only type of speech activity in which nothing depends on the person performing it.
Listening, requiring extremely intense mental activity, causes rapid fatigue and disabling the
listener's attention. Unfavorable conditions for the auditor, of course, make it difficult to master it. Thus,
the presence of significant and varied listening difficulties is an indisputable fact. Obviously, for
successful learning, listening requires a methodological system that takes into account these difficulties
and provides for their overcoming.
Removing difficulties, naturally, facilitates mastering listening and gives quick and tangible
results. Therefore, teachers often strive to facilitate the activities of students. Since the main purpose of
training is to prepare the learner for speech communication in natural conditions, the learning process will
only be focused and effective when the student has already encountered the difficulties of natural speech
and learned to overcome them. Consequently, it seems correct not to eliminate, but to gradually and
consistently overcome difficulties in the learning process.
It should also be noted that excessive facilitation of activity does not contribute to its
improvement. As psychologists point out, the most effective is such training in any activity, which is
carried out in conditions of high tension of the individual psyche, mobilizing his will and attention, and
the precise functioning of all mental mechanisms. Thus, such a training should be considered useful for
improving listening, in which rather difficult exercises are performed, however, subject to the viability of
these difficulties.
In order to focus on teaching listening to overcome difficulties and develop on this basis skills and
abilities capable of successfully operating in natural conditions, it is necessary to clearly imagine these
difficulties. The difficulties of listening can be related to:
a) with the language form of the message;
b) with the semantic content of the message;
c) with the terms of the presentation of the message;
d) with sources of information.
e) due to the unexplored language material contained in the message;
f) due to the presence in the message of a familiar, but difficult for listening comprehension
language material.
Overcoming the difficulty of understanding a text containing unexplored language material is
provided by the formation of the ability to guess the meaning of new words, as well as the ability to
understand the meaning of the phrase and the text as a whole, despite the presence of unfamiliar elements
in it. For this purpose, we can recommend exercises that teach guesses on word-formation elements,

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 e-ISSN : 2620 3502
International Journal on Integrated Education
p-ISSN : 2615 3785

guesses about the meaning of common root words with studied, converted and international words, as
well as context guesses.
The ability to understand the meaning, despite the presence in the text of unfamiliar language
material, is formed with the help of exercises that teach the understanding of groups of words, phrases
and microtexts containing unfamiliar language material.
The second group of difficulties at the level of language material is related to the fact that when
familiarizing with new words, grammatical phenomena or speech patterns, the attention of students is
usually attracted to the difficulties of reproducing this material, while the difficulties of recognition
remain unworked. This leads to the fact that not all studied language material is easily learned by students
during reading and listening.
In order to ensure the correct recognition of linguistic material, one should pay attention to the
difficulties that may arise when listening to it. It is also necessary to perform special exercises for
recognizing these phenomena in phrases and microtexts.
Speaking about the difficulties of language form, it should be mentioned about the length of
sentences. It is known that the amount of short-term memory, in which the phrase is stored until its end, is
small. In the event that the length of the sentence exceeds the amount of memory, the listener forgets the
beginning of the phrase and therefore cannot synthesize its meaning. Therefore, at the beginning of
training the length of the phrase should not exceed 5-6 words. However, in the process of training should
increase the number of words in the phrase, so that by the end of training to bring it to 10-12 words. It
should also be noted that not only the length of the phrase affects its retention in the memory, but also its
depth.
The role of the semantic content of the message for teaching listening is difficult to overestimate.
It is known that obtaining information is the goal of receptive types of speech activity. It is difficult and
even impossible to make a person listen carefully if the content of the message is familiar to him, or
uninteresting, or incomprehensible. It is the desire to understand the meaning that will force the listener to
mobilize attention, memory, and all mental activity, make it necessary to overcome difficulties.
Therefore, the effectiveness of teaching listening depends primarily on the student's interest in
understanding the content of speech.
Often in teaching practice one has to deal with the fact that listening instruction is conducted on
uninteresting, non-informative, empty texts. The use of
such texts is often explained by the same desire to facilitate the task of the learner, since the foreign
language form is difficult, and one should concentrate all the listener's efforts on it, making the content as
simple and accessible as possible. Numerous experimental studies confirm the incorrectness of this point
of view. Experimental results suggest that students better understand and memorize difficult but
informative texts than light but primitive ones.
Thus, the main requirement for the content of the texts for listening should be their entertaining
and informative content. Gradation of difficulties in relation to the semantic content of texts can be
expressed in the transition from interesting texts to informative. By entertaining include texts that have an
interesting plot for this age. These texts can be quite simple and accessible to students. At a more
advanced stage, along with entertaining texts one should use content texts, i.e. texts containing new and
useful information for students. These include texts of regional geographic and cultural nature, popular
science texts, etc.
Facilitates the understanding of the semantic content and also the name of the text, if it reflects the
main idea, or the main content of the text. It is useful at the beginning of learning to preface a brief
introduction to the text, creating the direction of thought, without, however, retelling the main content.
Taking care of the content of the texts, one should not overload them with information. The
feasibility of the text is one of the basic principles of selection. Feasibility is provided by a combination
of information content and redundancy. Along with the new information, the texts should contain
information already known to students. The presence of such elements creates favorable conditions for
the functioning of the mechanism of probabilistic forecasting, increases its reliability and thereby
facilitates the understanding of the meaning.
The difficulties associated with the audited speech message should include its volume. Difficult
conditions for the reception of auditory information, intense activity of mental mechanisms lead to rapid

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 e-ISSN : 2620 3502
International Journal on Integrated Education
p-ISSN : 2615 3785

fatigue, a dulling of attention and refusal to receive information. In order not to cause information
overload, the volume of the text should correspond to the student's mental abilities. It is known that the
fast pace of presentation of information always causes great difficulties. It has been established that the
optimum for the listener is a pace of audited speech that corresponds to the pace of his own speaking.
However, the pace of the student's speech in a foreign language is always very slow, therefore, the
presentation of the texts at such a pace is impractical. A natural pace, even a slow one, will seem like a
student too fast and can be a serious obstacle to understanding.
Overcoming this very serious listening difficulty can be done while maintaining the average pace
of natural foreign language speech, but under the condition that to ease the understanding at the initial
stage, some slowdown of the speech rate is allowed due to the pauses between the phrases. Such pauses,
without distorting the correct intonation pattern of the phrase, without reducing the absolute rate of
speech, allow the auditor to eliminate the lag in the internal pronunciation. Another prerequisite for
understanding the speech of the natural pace is to increase the speed of the student‘s inner speech. It is
known that the lag of internal pronunciation from the pace of the speech being audited is the main reason
for not understanding fast speech. In the process of learning to listen, audiovisual and auditing sources of
information are used.
The audiovisual sources include: all kinds of visual clarity, accompanied by the teacher's story,
sounded movies, television and the speech of the teacher. Audience sources include records, sound
recordings and radio programs.
To establish the gradation of difficulties of audiovisual sources, it is necessary to determine how
different types of visual support affect listening. For methodological purposes, it is important to
distinguish the subject, or pictorial, clarity, as well as the gestures and facial expressions of the speaker,
which, although not revealing the content of speech, but convey the emotional attitude of the speaker to
the statement. Observation of the speaker‘s articulation reinforces the auditory sensations and makes the
perception of the voiced speech more complete and accurate. Consequently, the easiest will be the source
of information, which combines both types of visibility, i.e. story teacher on the picture.
The next most difficult source of information will be a film accompanied by the teacher‘s speech.
Students will not be able to observe the facial expressions and gestures of the speaker, but the presence of
substantive clarity in the form of film frames and the familiar voice will facilitate understanding. Audio
recordings are a more complex source of information, since unfamiliar voices are always recorded on
them. However, with repeated listening and interruptions in the hearing, making them an easier source of
information than radio broadcasts. The value of radio programs lies in the fact that in the process of
learning, students use language as a means of natural communication, receiving new interesting
information with their help.

2. CONCLUSION
In conclusion, it should be emphasized once again that effective listening instruction is
impossible without taking into account and the gradation of the difficulties of speech activity. A system of
exercises designed for teaching listening should be aimed at overcoming these difficulties. The feasibility
of the exercises is ensured both by the gradual and sequential inclusion and working out of difficulties,
and by the focus of the exercise on overcoming only one new difficulty.

REFERENCES
1. N. Elukhina. The main difficulties of listening and ways to overcome them. - General methods
of teaching foreign languages: A reader / Comp. Leontiev A.A. - M.: 1991. – 360p.
2. Winter I. A. Psychology of teaching foreign languages at school. - M.: Education, 1991. – 219p.
3. Slednikov B. L. Teaching foreign language listening in high school: Moscow: 1993. – 271p.

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