Regional varieties of English and listening comprehension skills of EFL university students

Learning a foreign language requires acquiring the skills of speaking, listening, reading and writing. Therefore, we focused our research on the listening skill and its representation in textbooks used at secondary schools in North Macedonia, specifically in relation to the two main regional varieties of English: British English and American English. We applied a qualitative analysis on the officially assigned EFL textbooks in secondary schools; and a quantitative analysis on a questionnaire distributed among university students of English language at the Faculty of Philology in Stip, North Macedonia. The questionnaire was anonymous and included listening comprehension tasks with multiple choice, which were partly in American English and partly in British English. The data from the questionnaire showed that a small number of errors occurred in all three listening tasks, and surprisingly the errors for the activities in American English and British English are very close in number. Our paper offers an insight into the abilities of the university students of English language at the Goce Delcev University and offers a short review on the materials used in secondary education; all in relation to the skill of listening as one of the essential skills in language learning.