Saudi High School Students’ Attitudes Towards English Language Practice of Listening Skills Inside and Outside The Class in EFL Setting

Abstract

The study investigates the attitudes of Saudi high school students towards practising English listening skills inside and outside the class in an EFL setting. This research also aims to discover if there is a significant difference between the EFL students’ attitudes toward English listening skills and their performance in English language proficiency. Furthermore, the relationship between the students’ attitudes toward English listening skills and listening comprehension problems is discussed. This study also explores the relationship between the students’ attitudes toward English listening skills and the type of school (public, private) they attend.

To collect the data, this research follows the quantitative methods approach, whereby a questionnaire is used. The participants in the study included 90 students from two high school classrooms (public and private) in the city of Arar, Saudi Arabia. The number of participating students from the public school is 49, and the number of students from the private school is 41. The research findings show that Saudi high school female students prefer to practise their listening skills outside of school rather than inside school. The results also indicate that there is no significant difference between EFL students’ attitudes toward English listening skills and their performance in English language proficiency. Also, it appeared that the perception type of problems correlated with the students’ attitudes toward listening skills with higher size effect than the rest of the problem types (i.e.parsing and utilization). Finally, the results show that there is no significant difference in the students' attitudes toward English listening skills for students who attend private and public schools.