Abstract The current study aimed to evaluate EFL students' listening skills. Therefore, a test of listening comprehension skills was designed to evaluate the listening performance of the third-year students of the Basic Education section. Forty third-year Basic Education students at Sohag Faculty of Education participated in the study. In addition, students' and instructors' perspectives were surveyed using structured interviews. The results of the study showed that EFL Basic Education students had numerous problems when it comes to their listening performance. In general, most of the interviewed instructors and students indicated that Basic Education students suffer from numerous symptoms of listening comprehension failure in foreign language learning settings. This affected not only their performance in language settings but also their overall academic performance. Based on these findings, a set of recommendations and suggestions were provided to foreign language instructors, text designers, and program developers. `