An Investigation of EFL Students’ Difficulties in in the Listening

Abstract

This study attempts to investigate the comprehension difficulties EFL learners encounter when listening to homophonic puns, as well as the relationship between their vocabulary knowledge and homophonic puns’ comprehension. The research study sample was randomly selected from third year LMD students of English at Jijel University. To fulfill the purpose of this study, a survey was directed to 36 participants. In which test was used to conduct students’ comprehension of homophonic puns and an open-ended test was used to test their vocabulary comprehension after listening to ten homophonic puns recorded by a native speaker. Findings of both tests revealed that third year EFL students face difficulties in understanding homophonic puns due to many factors such as cultural barriers, limited exposure to puns, linguistic knowledge, context, lack of vocabulary input