[ESL] What makes Listening Difficult?

Clustering:
In spoken language, due to memory limitations and our predisposition for “chucking”, or clustering, we break down speech into smaller groups of words.

Redundancy:
Learners ca train themselves to profit from such redundancy by first becoming aware that no every new sentence or phrase will necessarily contain new information and by looking for the signals of redundancy.

Reduced forms:
Reduction ca be phonological, morphological, syntactic, or pragmatic. These reductions pose significant difficulties especially for classroom learners who may have initially been exposed to the full forms of the English language.

Performance variables:
In spoken language, except for planned discourse, hesitations, false starts, pauses, and corrections are common.

Colloquial language:
Idioms, slang, reduced forms, and shared cultural knowledge are all manifested at some point n conversation. Contractions and other assimilations often pose difficulty for the learner of English.

Rate of delivery:
The number and length of pauses used by a speaker are more crucial to comprehension than sheer speed. The hearer may not always have the opportunity to stop the speaker. Instead, the stream of speech will continue to flows!

Stress, rhythm, and intonation:
The prosodic features of the English language are very important for comprehension.

Interaction:
Conversation is especially subject to all the rules of interaction: negotiation, clarification; attending signals; turn-taking; and topic nomination. maintenance, and termination.