English Listening and Speaking Difficulties and Self-Directed Enhancement Strategies among Undergraduate Aviation Business Students at North Bangkok University

Abstract

The objectives of this sequential mixed-methods research study were: 1) to examine the primary English listening and speaking difficulties experienced by undergraduate Aviation Business students at North Bangkok University (NBU) across linguistic, sociolinguistic, strategic, and affective dimensions; 2) to explore the self-directed enhancement strategies utilized by these students outside formal classroom boundaries; and 3) to propose an evidence-based, five-dimensional communicative enhancement framework tailored for their professional development. The target population comprised 400 undergraduate Aviation Business students within the Faculty of Arts. Criterion-based purposive sampling was employed, with inclusion criteria requiring Year 3 or Year 4 enrollment and completion of at least two Aviation English course units. All 200 students meeting these criteria constituted the study sample. Two primary research instruments were deployed: a 5-point difficulty rating questionnaire (n=200) to investigate core communicative difficulties across four theoretical constructs, and a semi-structured interview protocol (n=15) to explore autonomous learning practices. Quantitative data were analyzed using standard statistical procedures, yielding frequency counts, percentages, arithmetic means (x̄), and standard deviations (S.D.). Qualitative data underwent verbatim transcription and thematic content analysis. Content validity was established via an Index of Item-Objective Congruence (IOC) evaluation by three specialists, yielding congruence scores between 0.66 and 1.00. The quantitative results indicated that Affective Factors presented the highest dimension-level difficulty (x̄ = 4.43, S.D. = 0.55), with spontaneous production anxiety (x̄ = 4.62) and fear of grammatical evaluation (x̄ = 4.58) as the most acute individual items. Linguistic Competence ranked second at a Very High level (x̄ = 4.25), with decoding verbal instructions over background noise as the most demanding single item (x̄ = 4.54). Strategic and Sociolinguistic Competence constraints were also prominent. Qualitatively, three self-directed behavioral themes emerged: independent audiovisual immersion for accent adaptation, low-stakes AI-assisted practice for anxiety reduction, and collaborative peer role-plays for register-shift training. Synthesizing these findings, a five-dimensional communicative enhancement framework is proposed, organized across learner strategies, instructor approaches, classroom management, instructional materials, and assessment practices.