Teaching listening

Обучение слушанию

Студенты АРГУ им. К. Жубанова:

Қалабаева Әйкерім

Аннотация: Эта глава посвящена обучению навыкам слушания, которые называются навыком Золушки, который упускает из виду ее старшая сестра. Считается, что слушание - это не пассивный навык, а активный процесс конструирования значения из потока звуков. В конце главы освещены текущие проблемы в обучении навыкам слушания, чтобы указать будущее направление этого навыка. Кроме того, добавлен пример плана урока, чтобы связать теорию и практику преподавания этого интерактивного навыка.

Ключевые слова: методика, прослушивание, обучение, английский язык, умение слушать.

Teaching listening

Kalabayeva Aikerim

Abstract: This chapter is devoted to teaching listening skill which is called as a Cinderalla Skill overlooked by its elder sister speaking. It is maintained that listening is not a passive skill but an active process of constructing meaning from a stream of sounds. At the end of the chapter, current issues in the teaching of listening skill are highlighted to indicate the future direction of this skill. In addition, a sample lesson plan is added to link the theory and practice in the teaching of this interactive skill.

Key words: method, listening, teaching, English, listening skills.

Listening is the process of receiving, constructing meaning from and responding to

spoken and/or non-verbal messages.

Listening is an active, purposeful process of making sense of what we hear.

Listening comprehension is a highly complex problem-solving activity that can be broken down into a set of distinct sub-skills (Byrnes, 1984).

Listening is an active and interactional process in which a listener receives speech sounds and tries to attach meaning to the spoken words. The listener tries to understand the intended message of the oral text to respond effectively to oral communication. Listening and hearing are considered different process. While hearing is considered as physical, passive and natural process, listening is physical & mental, active and learnt process and is defined as a skill. Although listeners can understand messages presented at a rate of 380 words per minute, an average person speaks at a rate of about 150 words per minute. The following table shows the percentage of the use of language skills with formal years of training in daily life.

Table 1

Percentage of Communication

According to Table 1, Listening skill is the most used skill at a rate of 45% and it does not require any formal years of training. Next, people spend 30% of daily life communication by speaking and one to two years is necessary for formal training of speaking. While reading corresponds to 16% of our daily life language activities, finally writing occupies only 9% and 12 years formal education is required for its practice .

Historical perspective

More than a century ago, as a dominant method of language teaching, grammar translation gave no importance to listening skill, because the aim was to read and translate scientic texts from target language (mostly Latin) to native language. Then, there was a paradigm shift from written language to oral skills with the emerge of the Direct Method. In the second half of the 20th century, Audio Lingual Method emphasized the importance of listening skill and gave priority to oral proficiency. There were abundant use of language laboratories, tapes and cassettes to achieve native-like pronunciation. During 70’s, alternative methods were proposed by various researchers, listening skill was given prominence as the common characteristics of these methods. According to Krashen’s Input Hypothesis (1985), learners could learn best by exposure to comprehensible input which was slightly beyond their current level competence. Krashen (1985) pointed out that second language learning was similar to first language acquisition, thus listening was the first step on the way to language proficiency. Similarly, in his Total Physical Response, Asher (1977) stated that oral language was primary to written language and listening comprehension should precede speech production. He also emphasized that learners were supposed to listen and obey the orders given by the instructor through actions. In Communicative Language Teaching, language teaching was based on a view of language as communication and listening was the most prevailing part of daily life communication. In communicative context, four language skills were taught in an integrated way, supporting one after another. Listening was primarily used as a prompter or a first step before productive skills. In content-based instruction, listening and speaking were practiced in an integrated way such as viewing and discussion of a film and performing an interview. As from task-based language teaching, tasks provide both the oral and written input and output processing for language acquisition.

Listening sources

Comparing listening in one’s native language, listening in a foreign language is a more challenging task: “How well L2 listeners cope with these limitations will depend on their ability to make use of all the available resources to interpret what they hear” (Vandergrift, 2007, p. 193). Therefore, in a listening phenomenon, the use of appropriate listening sources has a crucial effect in comprehension. Various listening sources can be used in a language classroom. These are teacher talk, student talk, guest speakers, textbook recordings, TV, video, DVD, radio, songs and the internet (Wilson,2008). Teacher talk is valuable input for learners of a foreign language. The teacher can regulate the pace of speaking according to the students’ level and interest, repeat important parts and change the input as desired. Teacher talk can also be evaluated in terms of its quality. It should be clear, coherent and interesting for listeners. Teacher talk should be interactive in a way that students can ask questions and get an answer, which facilitates and supports student talk. Another way of exposing students to an authentic conversation is inviting guest speakers to the classroom, which provides learners a chance to interact in a more authentic way. Technological improvements have increased the types of listening resources in recent years. Both teachers and students can access listening materials easily via the internet. The computer and interactive technologies allow teachers to select materials of all kinds, support them as learners’ needs dictate, and use the visual options of screen presentation or the interactive capabilities of computer controls to help students develop good listening techniques .

Macro and micro listening skills

In most language classrooms, the listening process is skipped at the expense of listening outcome (Rezaei & Fatimah Hashim, 2013). Macro and micro listening skills can help to achieve listening awareness. Vandergrift & Tafaghodtari (2010) state that metalinguistic awareness and explicit teaching are crucial parts of listening comprehension tasks. Brown (2007) offers a simplified list of micro-skills and macro-skills for conversational listening. The macro-skills isolate those skills that relate to the discourse level of organization, while those that remain at sentence level continue to be called micro-skills.

Brown’s (2007) listening comprehension micro-skills for conversational discourse are as follows. 1. Retain chunks of language of different lengths in short-term memory.2. Discriminate among the distinctive sounds of English.3. Recognize English stress patterns, words in stressed and unstressed positions. rhythmic structure, intonational contours, and their role in signaling information.4. Recognize reduced forms of words. 5. Distinguish word boundaries, recognize a core of words, and interpret word order patterns and their significance.6. Process speech containing pauses, errors, corrections, and other performance variables.7. Process speech at different rates of delivery.8. Recognize grammatical word classes (nouns, verbs, etc.), systems (e.g., tense, agreement, pluralization), patterns, rules, and elliptical forms.9. Detect sentence constituents and distinguish between major and minor constituents.10. Recognize that a particular meaning may be expressed in different grammatical forms” .

Brown’s (2007) macro-skills for conversational discourse are: 1. “Recognize cohesive devices in spoken discourse. 2. Recognize the communicative functions of utterances, according to situations, participants, goals. 3. Infer situations, participants, goals using real-world knowledge (pragmatic competence).4. From events, ideas, etc., describe, predict outcomes, infer links and connections between events, deduce causes and effects, and detect such relations such as main idea, supporting idea, new information, given information, generalization, and exemplification. 5. Distinguish between literal and implied meanings. 6. Use facial, kinetic, body language, and other nonverbal cues to decipher meanings. 7. Develop and use a battery of listening strategies, such as detecting key words, guessing the meaning of words from context, appealing for help, and signaling comprehension or lack thereof”.

Stages in teaching listening skills

Vandergrift (1999) states that listening sequences improve students’ metacognitive abilities, especially in the first two years of language learning. These listening sequences may be divided into three stages as pre-listening, while-listening and post-listening and each of the three stages has its own specific purpose (Underwood, 1989). While-listening activities are the main activities of the listening tasks. Learners listen to the input and make decisions about the strategy to use according to the requirements of the task. Finally, in post-listening activities, learners discuss and evaluate their strategy choices and their effectiveness. Feedback is provided by self-evaluation and also group discussions. Pre-listening activities help to hear and give some clues about the activity expectations mostly by activating schemata. Imagine that you enter the classroom a little bit late and you see that the teacher has already started lecturing. Most probably, it will be difficult for you to grasp the topic and understand what is going on. Why do you think this happens? As you do not know the context and you do not have any prior knowledge about the context, the context will initially be inaccessible. Consequently, pre-listening activities serve the goal of ensuring students know what they need to know before they listen. Listeners need to know things like the speaker’s way of talking, the length of the text, the listener’s role, information about the topic, specialized vocabulary, and the relationship between listener and speaker (Wilson, 2008). A study conducted by Zohrabi et al. (2015) states that learners who are exposed to pre-listening activities performed better than those who did not take pre-listening activities. They also assert that pre-listening tasks are effective for students in understanding authentic English movies. Pre-listening activities activate the schemata and help students to predict what they will hear. Activating schemata means activating students’ prior knowledge. Activities to activate learners’ schemata might include brainstorming, visuals, realia, text and words, situations and opinions, ideas and facts. Brainstorming activities aim to produce ideas based on a topic or a problem. Brainstorming can be realized via a poster display in which students prepare a poster based on a given topic, brainwalking in which they walk around the classroom and enlarge the ideas collaboratively, boardwriting, in which they work in groups and they brainstorm about the same topic or a different one, and from one to many in which students work individually, take notes and then share the ideas with the group.