LISTENING SKILLS OF COLLEGE FRESHMEN OF THE NUEVA

ECIJA UNIVERSITY OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY

VLADIMIR T. TAMAYO
Abstract- Effective academic communication means the demonstration of a certain
degree of knowledge and expertise when participating in the most frequent
communicative events inside the world of higher education. Specifically, listening skills
affect the academic performance of learners. A student should possess this skill to excel
not only inside the classroom but also to be globally competitive.
This study focused on the listening skills of college freshmen from the Nueva
Ecija University of Science and Technology. Specifically, the study was conducted to
answer the questions on the profile of the respondents and to assess their listening skills
in terms of receiving, understanding, remembering, evaluating, and responding stages.
The study also determined the significant relationship between the respondents’ profile
variable and their listening skills. In the end, the researcher proposed
activities/interventions that would enhance the listening skills of the students.
The respondents of the study were college freshmen enrolled during the
Academic Year 2015-2016. The study used frequency counts and percentages as the
statistical treatments in order to interpret and analyze the data.
Keywords: listening, skills, freshmen

I. INTRODUCTION
The importance of listening extends far beyond academic and professional
settings. Understanding how to practice good listening in a day to day life, among
friends, family, teachers, and classmates, is important for a number of reasons: fostering
good self-esteem, maximizing productivity, improving relationships, and even becoming
a better speaker.
Specifically, Barclay (2011) differentiated what is hearing from listening: hearing
is the physiological process through which sound waves are collected through the ear
where auditory information is transmitted to the brain while listening. In contrast,
listening is the act of assigning meaning to what is heard. In the same way, Downs (2008)
introduced a similar concept of hearing-listening difference; she defined listening as
making an effort to hear something; to pay attention or heed while hearing is the
physiological process of the ear absorbing sound waves and transferring them along
neural pathways to parts of the brain. Though hearing is necessary for listening, listening
is much more than processing sound.
In order to assess the listening skills of an individual, there are five stages a sound
must go through to determine that the oral message being transmitted has been
successfully delivered. These stages are receiving, understanding, remembering,
evaluating and responding (Wrench et al., 2011).

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 II. STATEMENT OF THE PROBLEM
The main concern of the study was to determine the listening skills of freshmen
students of the Nueva Ecija University of Science and Technology. Specifically, the
researcher sought to answer the following problems:
1. How may the profile of the respondents be described in terms of:
1.1. age;
1.2. sex;
1.3. civil status;
1.4. religion;
1.5. course;
1.6. language/s spoken at home;
1.7. audio-gadgets used; and
1.8. program/s watched or listened to?
2. How may the listening skills of the respondents be described in terms of:
2.1. Receiving;
2.2. Understanding;
2.3. Remembering;
2.4. Evaluating; and
2.5. Responding?
3. Is there a significant relationship between the profile of the students and their listening
skills?
4. What activities may be proposed to enhance/improve the listening skills of the
students?
III. RESEARCH METHOD
The present study used Descriptive-co- relational research design which Weiten
(2012) stated that these methods include naturalistic observation, case studies and
surveys. It is concerned to describe patterns of behaviour and discover links or
associations between variables. The goal is the acquisition of factual, accurate and
systematic data that can be used in averages, frequencies and similar statistical
calculations.
IV. CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK
Listening is the combination of what is heard, remembered and understood from
the message. This study was anchored on the five stages of listening by Wrench et al.
(2011): receiving, understanding, remembering, evaluating and responding or feedback.
The receiving stage is the intentional focus of hearing a speaker’s message, which
happens when other sources are filtered out so the message is isolated and avoid the
confusing mixture of incoming stimuli. In short, the message is simply heard. On the
other hand, the understanding stage is when a listener attempts to learn the meaning and
tone of the message. The third stage is remembering, which begins with listening; if one
cannot remember something that was said, he might not have been listening effectively.
At this level, the listeners try to recall the names, places, and important events within the
message.

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 Moreover, the fourth stage is evaluating, or judging the value of the message
wherein a listener assigns meanings to the message. The listeners evaluate the possibility,
probability and accuracy of evidences given in the message.
Finally, the last stage of the listening process is responding or sometimes referred
to as feedback. It is the stage at where listeners indicate their involvement by putting
themselves to the situation and react to it.
V. RESULTS AND DISCUSSIONS
I. The Profile of the Respondents
The first specific problem posted in Chapter I dealt with the profile of the college
freshmen as to age, sex, civil status, religion, course, language spoken at home, audio-
gadgets available and program/s watched or listened to.
1.1 Age The result shows that most of the respondents were in the 16-17 age bracket,
which is appropriate for college freshmen.
1.2 Sex The statistics indicates that there was only slight difference in the number of
males against females.
1.3 Civil Status The results simply indicate that almost all of the respondents were single
compared to married ones.
1.4 Religion The data have shown that most college freshmen of the Nueva Ecija
University of Science and Technology were Roman Catholic.
1.5 Course Majority of the respondents were taking up Business Management course
1.6 Language/s Spoken at Home
The results clearly present that Tagalog was the most spoken language at home by
the respondents.
1.7 Audio-Gadgets Used
Generally, the data indicate that the majority of the respondents used mobile
phone for audio-gadgets.
1.8 Program/s Watched or Listened To
The data collected clearly state that listening to music/songs was the most
frequent activity of the respondents as it obtained rank 1.
II. Listening Skills of the Respondents
The second specific problem dealt with the listening skills of college freshmen
were as to five (5) stages: receiving stage, understanding stage, remembering stage,
evaluating stage, and responding stage.
2.1 Receiving Stage - It may be inferred that almost half of the number of the
respondents had successfully received and heard the message.
2.2 Understanding Stage - The findings manifest that majority of the respondents did
not totally understand the message. Most of them obtained scores which did not even
reach half of the total score.
2.3 Remembering Stage - It may be observed that the generality of the respondents had
excellent remembering skills. They had the ability to remember names, places and events.
2.4 Evaluating Stage - It may be reflected on the data that majority of the respondents
had difficulty in the evaluating stage. They failed to draw inferences, analyze information
and assign meanings to the message.

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2.5 Responding Stage - The same observation may be noted that majority of the
respondents had difficulty in responding stage. They failed to give feedback to the
message being heard.
2.6 Overall Scores in Listening Skills - The Nueva Ecija University of Science
Technology college freshmen’s listening skills were in between good and very good in
verbal interpretation.
VI. CONCLUSIONS
Based on the findings of the study, the following conclusions were drawn:
1. The respondents were in the age appropriate for freshmen, slightly dominated
by males, generally dominated by single in status and Roman Catholic, whose highest
number of respondents came from Business Management, whose most used language at
home was Tagalog, mobile phones for gadget for it was accessible at all times, and listen
to music which was their most spent activity during the day.
2. The overall scores of the respondents in the listening test given to them showed
that the college freshmen of the Nueva Ecija University of Science Technology had good
listening skills.
3. Except for religion and age, sex, civil status, course, gadgets used, language
spoken at home and programs watched or listened to affect the respondents’ listening
skills.
4. Proposed activities/interventions were developed to enhance the listening skills
of the respondents. The proposed activities/interventions were designed based on the
findings of the study, following its content will help students reach their fullest potential
in learning the English language.
VII. RECOMMENDATIONS
After careful deliberation of the conclusions of the study, the following
recommendations are offered:
1. Teachers may provide lessons that feed questions to test students’ comprehension,
situations that cultivate the students’ evaluating and responding skills, and real life
situations that lead to role playing on the part of the students; encourage students to
participate in listening to relevant campus activities such as seminars that would enhance
their listening skills; create activities inside and outside the classroom that will enhance
students’ listening skills such as interviewing people, listening to people talking in the
canteen, jeep or bus or just people merely talking at the corridors and relate to the lesson
at hand so students will not become gossips and eavesdroppers; be given opportunities to
attend seminars or workshops to update themselves with modern methods and technique
in teaching; be encouraged to speak English including the non-English teachers except
for Filipino teachers because English should be used as a medium of instruction not only
by English teachers; and adopt the contents of the proposed activities/interventions to be
able to improve and enhance the listening skills of students.

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2. Students may motivate themselves to listen to their teachers during discussion to attain
better understanding; expose themselves into campus activities/events that launch
contests such as quiz bees and essay writings; listen to stories fiction or non-fiction, and
try to evaluate the content of the material and respond to every situation in the story
heard.
3. Researchers may replicate this study using college freshmen from other state
universities; and pursue further studies on listening skills
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