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In all the cases (Questions 2a-2d), the most frequent choices made by the students were iden-tical to those made by the teachers. That is, both groups tended to choose “asking directly” as a response. This finding suggests that whether listeners are native or non-native English speakers does not matter considerably.The comparison of the results on two types of failure to hear (able to hear but could not under-stand meaning and able to understand but could not recognize an utterance) uncovered certain trends. For the most frequently occurring failure—the ability to understand accompanied with the inability to recognize an utterance—the most popular solution was to request repetition. For the other type of failure, the most favored strategy was to request an explanation. These findings are logical because the chosen strategies are the shortest way to solve the corresponding problems. People change their approaches depending on what a problem is.For the other type of failure—the ability to understand accompanied with the inability to recognize an utterance—the second common strategy was attempting to understand utterances indirectly. These results accord with the argument suggested by Schlangen5). Schlangen stated that clarification request vary in their form and their function. RQ3: Are the ways language learners seek clari-fication different from those used by native speakers? In order to compare the way language learners and native speakers seek clarification, we asked four faculty members whose native language was English. We observed some similarities and differ-ences between the students and native speakers. About Question 2a, talking to a best friend, all of the native speakers chose the direct way of asking, “What’s ‘ennui’?” In case of the students, even though half of them chose the same option, repeating, “Did you say ‘ennui’?” was the second most popular response. About Question 2c, talking to an older person, most of the students chose “Sorry, could you please say that again?” However, the responses from native speakers varied. Two of them chose a direct way, “What does ‘Alu sequence’ mean?” Only one native instructor chose “Sorry, could you please say that again?” We also observed some differences in the students’ responses depending on their language proficiency levels. Among those who chose the strategy of attempting to understand utterances indirectly as answers to Questions 2b and 2d, approximately 60% to 70% were from English classes A and B—classes attended by high-level English users. It can be hypothesized that individ-uals who can handle English better tend to choose indirect understanding, as this strategy requires high English proficiency. The differences between native speakers and language learners, as well as those between high-proficient and low-proficient learners could be due to linguistic differences. As stated in the past studies, English is an analytic language conveying relationships between words in sentences through particles, prepositions, and similar components6). Compared to English, the meanings in Japanese are determined by morphemes. As English speakers try to find relationships between words, they might opt for indirect under-standing. The study’s findings are summarized as follows: First, the most common causes of hearing failure were a lack of vocabulary and speech speed. Second, “asking directly” was the most popular strategy for seeking clarification. Note, however, that the native speakers and highly proficient students tended to favor indirect understanding. No clear patterns were found when the fellow interactant of a speaker was different, familiar versus unfamiliar. In the future, more accurate conclusions would be obtained using more random-ized and larger samples. We are grateful to the anonymous reviewer for the helpful suggestions that substantially improved our article.No funding was received.MK, MS, and HM planned the work and wrote the manuscript. RF supervised the work and 573ConclusionAcknowledgmentsFundingAuthor contributions

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