General principles in teaching Listening Comprehension

Contents

INTRODUCTION………………………………………………………………3

I. GENERAL NOTION OF LISTENING COMPREHENSION IN TEACHING ENGLISH

1.1 Listening as a skill.

1.2 General principles in teaching Listening Comprehension.

1.3 Analysis of potential Listening Comprehension problems.

1.4 Listening activities and teaching methods for Listening Comprehension.

II. PRACTICAL USAGE OF LISTENING COMPREHENSION ACTIVITIES.

2.1 Activities and procedures of  Listening Comprehension.

2.2 Suggestions for improvement of English Listening Comprehension.

2.3  Experimental work.

CONCLUSION

BIBLIOGRAPHY

APPENDIX 

 

 

 

 

 

 

                                             Introduction                                                                                                                                           The theme of our course paper is “The Importance of   “ Listening  Comprehension in teaching English”.                                                                                                                                       Topicality:  Listening plays an important role in communication as it is said that, of the total time spent on communicating, listening takes up 40-50%; speaking, 25-30%; reading, 11-16%; and writing, about 9% [3;24]. Although the teaching of listening comprehension has long been ―somewhat neglected and poorly taught aspect of English in many EFL programs, listening is now regarded as much more important in both EFL classrooms and SLA research. Listening involves an active process of deciphering and constructing meaning from both verbal and non-verbal messages. Thus, the label of passive skill applied to listening is a misnomer. This misunderstanding may stem from the fact that superficially learners seem to only sit in a language lab quietly, listen to pre-recorded dialogues, and write the answers to some questions related to the oral stimulus. It is evident, then, that listening is not as passive‘ as it has been claimed to be as it demands a number of complicated processes on the part of the learners. There are two subsuming cognitive processes: bottom-up (data-driven) and top-down (conceptually-driven). The bottom-up processing involves constructing meaning from the smallest unit of the spoken language to the largest one in a linear mode [6;69]. Thus, the learners attempt to understand a spoken discourse by decoding a number of sounds to form words. Next, a nexus of words are linked to form phrases, which make up sentences. These sentences build a complete text, the meaning of which is then constructed by the listeners. In addition to the grammatical relationships, such  suprasegmental phonemes as stress, rhythm and intonation also substantially contribute to this data-driven processing . Learners can be trained to perform this processing, for instance, by activities that require them to discriminate two sounds or distinguish rising and falling intonations. The top-down processing, on the other hand, refers to interpreting meaning as intended by the speakers by means of schemata or structures of knowledge in the mind. This view emphasizes the prominence of background knowledge already possessed by the learners in making sense of the information they hear. In the aural perception, the prior knowledge may facilitate their attempt to grasp the incoming information by relating the familiar with the new one, and significant lack of such knowledge can hamper their efforts to comprehend a particular utterance. It is, therefore, essential that learners are accustomed to performing this processing, usually by extracting the gist of the exchange they listen to. Due to the fact that the communicative approach is increasingly used in EFL situation, we, therefore, stress the importance of  students‘ communicative competence. The need for competence in listening in EFL English language learners is increasing, so that listening teaching has attracted considerable attention. Unfortunately, the teaching of listening skills is still neglected in the English language teaching process. EFL learners have serious problems in English listening comprehension due to the fact that universities pay more attention to English grammar, reading and vocabulary. Listening and speaking skills are not important parts of many course books or curricula and teachers do not seem to pay attention to these skills while designing their lessons. EFL English language learners have limited listening comprehension. Listening levels of learners are different from each other, because listening is affected by crucial factors. The most important factors that should be emphasized are: the significance of listening, the study of listening teaching theory and use of the most advanced listening teaching methods. In many English language classes, grammar-translation method is used for teaching. This method has been found inadequate to the demands for producing efficient English speakers and listeners. So a new teaching method should be used to meet the needs of students. This new method is called communicative approach. English must be taught as a tool for communication. It is now widely accepted that students‘ listening ability must be at the core of teaching practice, and it is the area in which teachers need to concentrate their own efforts to improve their teaching. This is a significant challenge for English teachers; however, it is crucial in the development of English language communicative competence. The purpose of this approach is to improve the  students‘ English overall linguistic capability and oral and aural competence. The researchers attempt to discuss the definition of listening, importance of listening. Then, they review the process of listening comprehension, strategies of listening comprehension. Analysis of listening comprehension problems is reviewed. Then, teaching methods for listening comprehension and teaching listening activities will be discussed. Finally, general principles in teaching listening comprehension are discussed. Findings of this study will be beneficial to EFL learners to improve their English language listening comprehension ability.                                                                                                                                                           Aims: the aim is to give theoretical and practical argumentation of the necessity of Listening comprehension to provide effective classroom learning.

         Objectives:

• To state the importance of  Listening Comprehension;
• To describe the necessity of Listening Comprehension;
• To identify the problems in  Listening Comprehension;
• To list the types of activities in  Listening Comprehension.

        Object: The use of  Listening Comprehension as the means of effective classroom learning.

Subject: the use of the most effective and frequently applied listening activities . The problem:  There are a lot of problems connected with Listening Comprehension such as, pupils cannot control how quickly a  speaker  speaks  and  they cannot always have the words repeated. These are the main problems of our research.

Hypothesis: Effective teaching cannot be ensured without listening comprehension. By paying more attention to listening comprehension teachers of foreign language will achieve great success and will get the better results in language may be expected.                      

The basis of investigation is the school named after A.Aitiev.

The methods of investigation:  analysis  of scientific, theoretical, methodological and educational literature on the problem of investigation; observation of the process of teaching  Listening Comprehension, research experiment.

The theoretical value: the presented material may be useful for teachers and students researching the problem of teaching Listening Comprehension.

The practical value: the tasks and activities and effective methods and techniques, the suggestions and guidelines on teaching Listening Comprehension given in the practical part of the course paper will be effective tools for teachers of English at school.

The structure of our course paper consists of Introduction, two chapters, Conclusion, Bibliography. The first chapter is devoted to the methodological and pedagogical aspects of teaching Listening Comprehension as well as to the  psychological  features  of  EFL  learners. The second chapter consists of the various creative and effective methods successfully used during our practical experience  at  school  named  after  A.Aitiev.    In  the conclusion we point out and resume the results of our investigation. Then comes bibliography, which   followed by the appendix.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I. GENERAL NOTION OF LISTENING COMPREHENSION IN TEACHING ENGLISH

1.1 Listening as a skill.

According to Anderson and Lynch , arguing what is successful listening, ―understanding is not something that happens because of what a speaker says: the listener has a crucial part to play in the process, by activating various types of knowledge, and by applying what he knows to what he hears and trying to understand what the speaker means. Underwood simplified the definition of listening to "the activity of paying attention to and trying to get meaning from something we hear" .  Mendelsohn  defines listening comprehension as ―the ability to understand the spoken language of native speakers.'' O‘Malley, Chamot, and  Kupper offer a useful and more extensive definition that ―listening comprehension is an active and conscious process in which the listener constructs meaning by using cues from contextual information and from existing knowledge, while relying upon multiple strategic resources to fulfill the task requirement. Mendelsohn  points out that, in listening to spoken language, the ability to decipher the speaker‘s intention is required of a competent listener, in addition to other abilities such as processing the linguistic forms like speech speed and fillers, coping with listening in an interaction, understanding the whole message contained in the discourse, comprehending the message without understanding every word, and recognizing different genres. Listeners must also know how to process and how to judge what the illocutionary force of an utterance is- that is, what this string of sounds is intended to mean in a particular setting, under a particular set of circumstances – as an act of real communication [2;19]. Purdy defined listening as "the active and dynamic process of attending, perceiving, interpreting, remembering, and responding to the expressed (verbal and nonverbal), needs, concerns, and information offered by other human beings". Listening comprehension is an inferential process. Linguistic knowledge and world knowledge interact as listeners create a mental representation of what they hear. Bottom up and top down processes are applied to get to this mental representation and achieve comprehension. Rost defined listening as a process of receiving what the speaker actually says, constructing and representing meaning, negotiating meaning with the speaker and responding, and creating meaning through involvement, imagination and empathy. To listen well, listeners must have the ability to decode the message, the ability to apply a variety of strategies and interactive processes to make meaning, and the ability to respond to what is said in a variety of ways, depending on the purpose of the communication. Listening involves listening for thoughts, feelings, and intentions. Doing so requires active involvement, effort and practice [7;89]. To sum up, it is widely admitted that listening comprehension is not merely the process of a unidirectional receiving of audible symbols, but an interactive  process . In the eight processes of comprehension [9;11] the hearer, after receiving the information, assigns a literal meaning to the utterance first and then assigns an intended meaning to the utterance. A key to human communication is the ability to match perceived meaning with intended meaning.                                                                        Listening is the most frequently used language skill. Bird found that female college students spent 42 percent of their total verbal communication time in listening while they spent 25 percent in speaking, 15 percent in reading, and 18 percent in writing. A study conducted by Barker, Edwards, Gaines, Gladney, and Holley confirmed Bird's view of the primacy of listening and showed that the portion of verbal communication time spent by college students was 52.5 percent in listening, 17.3 percent in reading, 16.3 percent in speaking, and 13.9 percent in writing. According to Devine, listening is the primary means by which incoming ideas and information are taken in Gilbert, on the other hand, noted that students from kindergarten through high school were expected to listen 65-90 percent of the time. Wolvin and Coakley concluded that, both in and out of the classroom, listening consumes more of daily communication time than other forms of verbal communication. Listening is central to the lives of students throughout all levels of educational development. Listening is the most frequently used language skill in the classroom. Both instructors  and students acknowledge the importance of listening comprehension for success in academic settings. Numerous studies indicated that efficient listening skills were more important than reading skills as a factor contributing to academic success. However, Dunkel's study reported that international students' academic success in the United States and Canada relied more on reading than listening comprehension, especially for those students in engineering, psychology, chemistry, and computer science. Thus, the importance of listening in classroom instruction has been less emphasized than reading and writing. Nevertheless, it is evident that listening plays a significant role in the lives of people. Listening is even more important for the lives of students since listening is used as a primary medium of learning at all stages of education.

1.2 General principles in teaching Listening Comprehension.

Listening comprehension lessons must have definite goals, carefully stated. These goals should fit into the overall curriculum, and both teacher and students should be clearly cognizant of what they are.

1. Listening comprehension lessons should be constructed with careful step by step planning. This implies, that the listening tasks progress from simple to more complex as the student gains in language proficiency; that the student knows exactly what the task is and is given directions as to - what to listen for, where to listen, when to listen, and how to listen.''

2. Listening comprehension  lesson structure should demand active overt student participation. The ―most overt student participation involves his written response to the Listening comprehension material,'' and that immediate feedback on performance helps keep interest and motivation at high levels.

3.Listening comprehension lesson should provide a communicative urgency for remembering in order to develop concentration. This urgency, which along with concentration is a key factor in remembering, should come not from the teacher, but from the lesson itself. This is done by giving the students the writing assignment before they listen to the material.

4. Listening comprehension lessons should stress conscious memory work. One of the goals of listening is to strengthen the students‘ immediate recall in order to increase their memory spans. ''Listening is receiving, receiving requires thinking, and thinking requires memory; there is no way to separate listening, thinking, remembering.''

5. Listening comprehension lessons should ―teach, not ―test. This means that the purpose of checking the students‘ answers should be viewed only as feedback, as a way of letting the students‘ find out how they did and how they are progressing. There should be no pass/fail attitude associated with the correction of the exercises [3,125].

1.3 Analysis of potential Listening Comprehension problems.

Underwood states seven causes of obstacles to efficient listening comprehension. First, listeners cannot control the speed of delivery. He says,'' Many English language learners believe that the greatest difficulty with listening comprehension is that the listener cannot control how quickly a speaker speaks'' [11;48]. Second, listeners cannot always have words repeated. This is a serious problem in learning situations. In the classroom, the decision as to whether or not to replay a recording or a section of a recording is not in the hands of students. Teachers decide what and when to repeat listening passages; however, it is hard for the teacher to judge whether or not the students have understood any particular section of what they have heard [3,126]. Third, listeners have a limited vocabulary. The speaker may choose words the listener does not know. Listeners sometimes encounter an unknown word which may cause them to stop and think about the meaning of that word and thus cause them to miss the next part of the speech. Fourth, listeners may fail to recognize the signals which indicate that the speaker is moving from one point to another, giving an example, or repeating a point. Discourse markers used in formal situations or lectures such as ''secondly,'' or ''then'' are comparatively evident to listeners. In informal situations or spontaneous conversations, signals are more vague as in pauses, gestures, increased loudness, a clear change of pitch, or different intonation patterns. These signals can be missed especially by less proficient listeners. Fifth, listeners may lack contextual knowledge. Sharing mutual knowledge and common content makes communication easier. Even if listeners can understand the surface meaning of the text, they may have considerable difficulties in comprehending the whole meaning of the passage unless they are familiar with the context. Nonverbal clues such as facial expressions, nods, gestures, or tone of voice can also be easily misinterpreted by listeners from different cultures. Sixth, it can be difficult for listeners to concentrate in a foreign language. In listening comprehension, even the shortest break in attention can seriously impair comprehension. Conversation is easier when students find the topic of the listening passage interesting; however, students sometimes feel listening is very tiring even if they are interested because it requires an enormous amount of effort to follow the meaning. Seventh, students may have established certain learning habits such as a wish to understand every word. Teachers want students to understand every word they hear by repeating and pronouncing words carefully, by grading the language to suit their level, by speaking slowly and so on. As a result, they tend to become worried if they fail to understand a particular word or phrase and they will be discouraged by the failure. It is necessary for students to tolerate vagueness and incompleteness of understanding.

1.4 Listening activities and teaching methods for Listening Comprehension.

Listening is a highly-complex solving activities [5;15] in which listeners interact with a speaker to construct meaning, within the context of their experiences and knowledge. When students are made aware of the factors that affect listening, the levels of listening, and the components of the listening process, they are more likely to recognize their own listening abilities and engage in activities that prepare them to be effective listeners. Karakas states that listening activities try to prevent failure so that they can support the learner‘s interpretation of the text. Listening activities are usually subcategorized as pre-listening, while-listening, and post-listening activities.

A. Pre-listening Activities

Schema theory provides strong evidence for the effectiveness of pre-listening activities which includes the outline for listening to the text and teaching cultural key concepts. Listening teacher may select certain words, difficult grammatical structures and expressions to be explained through the discussion about the topic , and may also ask students to predict the content or what speakers are going to say, based on the information they have already got. Pre-listening activities usually have two primary goals: (a) to help to activate students‘ prior knowledge, build up their expectations for the coming information; and (b) to provide the necessary context for the specific listening task. The teacher could follow with a listening comprehension activity, such as two people having a conversation about their daily life. Students must answer true or false questions based on the previous listening activity. An example of a controlled practice activity could be a drill activity that models the same structure or vocabulary [5;24].                                                     B. While -listening  Activities                                                                                          Listeners who participate actively in the listening experience are more likely to construct clear and accurate meaning as they interpret the speaker‘s verbal message and nonverbal cues. During the listening experience students verify and revise their predictions. They make interpretations and judgments based on what they heard. Listening teacher may ask students to note down key words to work out the main points of the text. Students answer comprehension questions while listening to the text and select specific information to complete the table provided with the text. While-listening activities usually have some of the following purposes: to focus students‘ comprehension of the speaker‘s language and ideas; to focus students‘ attention on such things as the speaker‘s organizational patterns; to encourage students‘ critical reactions and personal responses to the speaker‘s ideas and use of language. An open-ended activity could follow that allows students to have the freedom to practice listening comprehension in the class about their daily life and asking for further information. Listening comprehension should begin with what students already know so that they can build on their existing knowledge and skills with activities designed on the same principle. A variation on the - filling in the missing word listening activity could be to use the same listening materials, but to set a pair work activity where student A and student B have the same worksheet where some information items are missing.                                                             C. Post-listening Activities Post-listening activities are important because they extend students‘ listening skill. Post-listening activities are most effective when done immediately after the listening experience. Well-planned post-listening activities offer students opportunities to connect what they have heard to their own ideas and experiences, and encourage interpretive and critical listening and reflective thinking. As well, post-listening activities provide opportunities for teachers to assess and check students‘ comprehension, and clarify their understandings; to extend comprehension beyond the literal level to the interpretive and critical levels. Different comprehension questions can be assigned for students to discuss after listening, students then swap information to complete the ―whole class chart, correlating what each student has heard to arrive at the big picture. If there are any questions that remain unanswered during the first or second listening, and after the information swap activity, the whole class can listen to the tape again. The students will then try to find the answer to the questions that have not been previously understood, rather than the teacher providing the answers straight away [5;79].                                                                                                         Teaching methods for Listening comprehension. Some of the teaching methods for improving students' listening comprehension skill are as follows:

A. Cultivating Students’ Listening Skills

Cultivating students‘ listening skills is one of the most difficult tasks for any EFL teacher. This is because successful listening skills are acquired over time and with lots of practice. The demands of the task are often frustrating for students because there are no precise rules, as in grammar teaching. Speaking and writing also have very specific exercises that can lead to improvement. However, there are quite specific ways of improving listening skills but these are difficult to quantify. Teachers must develop students‘ micro skills of listening comprehension. Brown  identifies seventeen listening comprehension micro skills. Some of the more important of these skills are discussed here. For beginners, the most important listening skill is discrimination in English pronunciation, intonation and language flow. They need to acquire the crucial skill of identifying the main information. Wu Zhengfu recognizes that when students acquire basic discrimination ability, they can select and analyze the meaning of what they hear and grasp the main content. In the teaching process teachers should cultivate students‘ ability to select main information and instruct students to control the general meaning of listening materials on the whole. In class, for example, teachers can ask students to listen to the general meaning of the passage, and to sum up key points and main information. Predictive ability is also an extremely important listening micro skill. In everyday communication, people continually make unconscious predictions about what speakers will say, and these predictions are made on the basis of their knowledge of the context in which the communication is made. The development of predictive ability has many aspects. Before listening training, teachers might ask students questions related to listening materials, or introduce relevant background knowledge to enlighten students‘ thinking to allow students a clear recognition of the goals and requirements of listening training. The ability to guess the meaning of words is also an important listening micro skill. Listening comprehension does not mean understanding every word, but some words do play a crucial part in listening comprehension. It is a normal phenomenon not to understand every word that is uttered. However, students may guess the meaning of new words on the basis of the topic being discussed and gain some understanding of the probable linguistic items on the basis of the context of discourses, the grammatical structure and the background knowledge of the topic.

B. Textbook-based Learning and Other Listening Contexts

Listening lessons require listeners to concentrate on the content and make fast responses to what is heard. If students are passive and apprehensive during listening training, they will probably feel nervous and wary of taking chances. Teachers need to take a non-punitive approach and structure lessons that are varied, vivid and interesting. Teachers need to select a wide range of materials to increase listening content besides using textbooks. Students need to listen to different levels of English in order to be exposed to natural, lively, rich language, such as listening to English songs, seeing films with English text. In these ways it is possible to raise students‘ enthusiasm, cultivate their listening interests, and achieve the goals of learning English.

C. Passing on Cultural Knowledge in Language Teaching

Understanding that language is controlled by particular cultural experiences is a necessity for the language learner. If the cultural differences between the students‘ own culture and that of the language they are to learn is excessive, learners will usually keep some distance from the target language in their efforts to maintain their psychological comfort level. As a consequence the operating processes of memory and input will certainly be limited [1;22]. Thus teachers need to be aware that breaking down the barriers is a significant part of cultural teaching and forms an important aspect of the whole process of language teaching. The aspect of cultural knowledge transmission is an equal part of language improvement and development of work in listening development has the potential for achieving a powerful influence on the formulation of students‘ thinking habits and the application of foreign language expressions. Cultural teaching, then, has direct and concrete influences on intercultural communication. When students gain an intimate knowledge of the culture of the target language they begin to understand how the language is used to reflect the thoughts, behaviors and customs of that society. In teaching English listening, teachers need to develop students‘ consciousness about intercultural communication and they need to energize students‘ capacity for wanting to engage with a different culture. Great care needs to be taken when selecting listening material and auxiliary texts, since these are a crucial aspect of the cultural factors in listening teaching. The selection of material related to British and American cultural background knowledge is of particular importance, since these tend to be the focus of much of the classroom time when students‘ thinking ability and intercultural awareness is being cultivated.