A COMPARATIVE STUDY ON THE STUDENTS LISTENING ANXIETY ACROSS PROFICIENCY LEVELS AND GENDER

Abstract

This study discusses things that very often happen to students when doing listening activities, namely, listening anxiety, to be specific listening anxiety on proficiency levels and gender. Two factors influence students to experience listening anxiety, with examples of internal factors as follows; lack of concentration when listening activities are in progress. While for external factors, one of them is; the audio was running too fast so they could not focus on listening. A quantitative method was employed to answer the research questions; about identifying whether there is a significant difference in student listening anxiety across proficiency levels, and whether there is any significant difference in student listening anxiety across gender. The study was conducted at the University of Islam Malang with 75 subjects, with 37 first semester students and 38 third semester students majoring English education from the Faculty of Teacher Training and Education. The participants were selected using random sampling. To collect data, FLLAS-J questionnaire consists of 33 items distributed online through Google form. The data from the questionnaire were analyzed by using an independent sample t-test, by using IBM SPSS 14.Findings from this study proved that the anxiety level of first semester students in higher level than third semester students, in the second research, namely listening anxiety across proficiency levels showed significant results with third semester students more low in listening anxiety rather than first semester students for, the third research ; listening anxiety across gender showed significant results between genders, both first and third semester students, where female students were more anxious than males students. From the findings of this study, the pedagogical and suggestions for teachers and further researchers are also discussed in this study. Suggestion for the future researcher is the subject can be changed from students in university but, to senior high school with larger quantities of the subjects for the more valid results.