A thesis submetted in partial fulfillment of the requirement for the award of thedegree "Licencié en Pédagogie Appliquée, Agrégé de l'Enseignement secondaire en Anglais

Résumé,

The present work seeks to understand if students succeed more or less while listening to British tapes than to American tapes. This survey is conducted at the University of Burundi in the English - Kirundi Department and the focus is on Fourth and fifth year students. The study compares their performance in English listening comprehension while using American versus British tapes and brings out some of the causes of the performance imbalance in listening to these two types of tape. It was based on the following three hypotheses :

1. Students perform better in their listening to British tapes than to American ones.
2. The lack of students' familiarity with the American accent is one of the causes of their low listening performance.

3. The lack of sufficient and varied listening comprehension materials with an American accent (tapes, books ... ) is another cause of students' low listening performance.
In order to gather data from targeted students, the researcher used two procedures i.e a questionnaire and a listening test given to the students already mentioned above. The results from the questionnaire and those from the listening test were presented in tables in order to facilitate the researcher to analyse them. It was found that it is easier for students to listen to American English (American tapes ) than to British English (British tapes) and that the lack of students' familiarity with the American accent as well as the lack of sufficient and varied listening comprehension materials with an American accent (tapes, books .. ) are some of the causes of students' low listening performance.

Therefore, recommendations were addressed to different stakeholders in Burundi educational system ; namely, the government, the teachers of the listening comprehension course, the students and further researchers.