Making sense of non-comprehension issues while listening: A data-based coding scheme

Listening has been a notoriously challenging language skill to research due to its ephemeral nature and the complex, dynamic and individualized operations that contribute to comprehension. Based on empirical data analysis using the idiodynamic method for research in applied linguistics, this paper presents a scheme for coding listening comprehension issues as expressed by students who attended an English medium instruction (EMI) lecture. The coding scheme consists of five broader conceptual categories (top-down, bottom-up, affective, multimodal, and environmental) that are further divided into specific codes used to classify data. The paper describes the emergence of these five categories and the codes subsumed within them, including illustrative data samples and discussion of the coding process. By combining theoretical and practical insights on the listening process with the idiodynamic method, the paper seeks to articulate challenges L2 listeners face and provides a fine-grained analysis tool for researchers working in this area.