Investigating EFL University Professors' Perspectives on the Factors that Affect EFL Students' Listening Comprehension

Learning a language skill is governed by factors that positively and negatively affect students' learning performance. This study aims to investigate EFL University professors' perspectives on the factors that affect EFL students' listening comprehension. To achieve the aim, the following question was set "What factors affect EFL students' listening comprehension?". The nature of the study is action research, the number of participants is limited to 7 university professors from the College of Arts and from the College of Education for Humanities at the University of Anbar. The study was conducted during the first semester of the academic year 2022-23. To collect the data a semi-structured interview was prepared. The sentence unit was used to analyze the data. The data was categorized into two groups, namely the "Positive Factors" and the "Negative Factors". The results revealed that the positive factors that affect students' listening performance are as follows: the length of the passage, the duration of practicing the listening skills, the nature of the topic, the motivation, vocabulary bank, instructor's fluency. The negative factors are: figuring out the main idea, quality of the listening source, attention span, speaking speed, number of English lessons, note-taking, body language, and idiomatic expressions. The conclusion revealed that listening comprehension is a difficult task that needs practice, time, effort, exposure to the native language, increased motivation, reduced speaking speed, increased listening time, and proficient university professors who are specialized in teaching language skills