Resumen

This work aims at exploring possible causes for ESI English IV students’ listening comprehension feeling of failure when exposed to the foreign language. With this in mind, we have administered a survey to thirty seven advanced students in an attempt to gain a broader understanding of their own perceptions in connection with possible instances of comprehension failure when listening. Basically, results have helped us identify 5 main areas of trouble whose range goes from the impossibility of distinguishing among the sounds of the foreign language to the incapability of thinking ahead or predicting. An array of listening strategies has been proposed in an effort to start devising a probable way to enhance these students’ listening performance. In an outgrowth of this study to be developed in the near future that has been conceived in compensation for some weaknesses of the present preliminary study, we have planned to conduct interviews with 10 subjects of our research population and design an experiment to work with listening strategies in
more depth.