From Hearing to Understanding: A New Perspective on Academic Listening Challenges

Abstract

Academic listening is a core academic skill that plays a vital role in students’ success in higher education, particularly for learners studying in a second or foreign language context. Despite its importance, listening is often misunderstood as a passive activity limited to hearing spoken input, rather than an active process of meaning construction. In practice, many university students experience difficulty transforming auditory input from lectures, seminars, and academic discussions into coherent understanding. This article aims to reconceptualize academic listening by shifting the focus from hearing to understanding. Using a qualitative descriptive library-based research approach, this study synthesizes theoretical and empirical literature on academic listening, listening comprehension, and metacognitive listening strategies. The analysis reveals that academic listening challenges are multidimensional, encompassing linguistic complexity, cognitive load, limited background knowledge, cultural and discourse differences, as well as affective factors such as listening anxiety. Furthermore, the findings emphasize the crucial role of metacognitive awareness in enabling learners to regulate their listening processes effectively. This article argues that academic listening should be viewed as an active, strategic, and teachable skill, and it offers pedagogical implications for improving listening instruction in higher education contexts.