TEACHING LISTENING COMPREHENSION

TEACHING LISTENING COMPREHENSION

 

Listening is the ability to identify and understand what others are saying. This involves understanding a speaker's accent or pronunciation, his grammar and his vocabulary, and grasping his meaning.

Listening is the ability to understand the meaning of the words one hears and to relate to them in some way.

Listening comprehension is a complex process in which listeners play an active role in discriminating between sounds, understanding vocabulary and grammatical structures, interpreting intonation and stress, and finally, making use of all the skills mentioned above, interpreting the utterance within the socio-cultural context. 

The Importance of Listening

1- Listening is the most common communicative activity in daily life: "we can expect to listen twice as much as we speak, four times more than we read, and five times more than we write." (Morley, 1991: 82)

2- Listening is also important for obtaining comprehensible input that is necessary for language development.

3- Students hear different accents and varieties.

4- Listening helps students to acquire language subconsciously.

What is involved in listening comprehension?

1-   speech perception (e.g., sound discrimination, recognize stress patterns, intonation, pauses, etc.)

2-   word recognition (e.g., recognize the sound pattern as a word, locate the word in the lexicon, retrieve lexical, grammatical and semantic information about the word, etc.)

3-   sentence processing (parsing; e.g., detect sentence constituents, building a structure frame, etc.)

4-   construct the literal meaning of the sentence (select the relevant meaning in case of ambiguous word)

5-   hold the information in short-term memory.

6-   recognize cohesive devices in discourse.

7-   infer the implied meaning and intention (speech act).

8-   predict what is to be said.

9-   decide how to respond.

Advises for teaching listening

1-   Use plenty of recorded material.

2-   Prepare the learners for listening by setting the scene, introducing the characters, pre-teaching vocabulary etc.

3-   Before the learners listen, set a listening task which directs them to an overall 'gist' understanding of the passage.

4-   Check the answers to this task, playing the recording again if necessary.

5-   Set a further task, or tasks, which direct learners to a more detailed understanding.

6-   Only use the tape script (if there is one!) as a last resort.

7-   Make the recording, and the tasks, as 'authentic' as possible.

Guidelines for Designing Listening Activities

   The following are guidelines for designing listening activities:

1.   Materials should be authentic.

2.   Videos/texts should last from two to five minutes.

3.   Tasks for each text/video should be arranged from easy to difficult.

4.     Texts/videos should be presented three to four times to students, with a different task each time.

5.   In teaching listening, homework is a must.

6.   Speaking and listening should be paired.

7.   Video clips are highly recommended for arousing students’ interest.

DIFFICULTIES

•         Students are trying to understand every word.

•         Students go back trying to understand what a previous word meant.

•         Students just don’t know the most important words.

•         Students don’t recognize the words they know.

•         Students have problems with different accents.

•         Students get tired.

•         Students have mental block.

•         Students are distracted.

•         Students cannot cope without images.

•         Students have hearing problems.

Framework of a listening lesson

The basic framework on which you can construct a listening lesson can be divided into three main stages.

1. Pre-listening

There are certain goals that should be achieved before students attempt to listen to any text. These are motivation, contextualization, and preparation.

a.     Motivation: Before listening students should be motivated to listen, so teachers should try to select a text that they will find interesting and then design tasks that will arouse the students' interest and curiosity.

b.    Contextualization: When we listen in our everyday lives we hear language within its natural environment, and that environment gives us a huge amount of information about the linguistic content we are likely to hear. FL teachers need to design tasks that will help students to contextualize the listening and access their existing knowledge and expectations to help them understand the text.

c.     Preparation: To help students do the tasks while they listen, it's vital that teachers cover the vocabulary or expressions that students will need before they start to listen.

2.    While listening

a.    When we listen to something in our everyday lives we do so for a reason. Students too need a reason to listen that will focus their attention. For our students to really develop their listening skills they will need to listen a number of times - three or four usually works quite well.

b.    Ideally the listening tasks we design for them should guide them through the text and should be graded so that the first listening task they do is quite easy and helps them to get a general understanding of the text. Sometimes a single question at this stage will be enough, not putting the students under too much pressure.

d.    The second task for the second time students listen should demand a greater and more detailed understanding of the text.

f.       The third listening task could just be a matter of checking their own answers from the second task or could lead students towards some more subtle interpretations of the text.

3.    Post-listening

There are two common forms that post-listening tasks can take.

a.    Reaction to the text

This could be discussion as a response to what we've heard - do they agree or disagree or even believe what they have heard? - or it could be some kind of reuse of the information they have heard.

b.    Analysis of language

The second of these two post-listening task types involves focusing students on linguistic features of the text. This is important in terms of developing their knowledge of language, it could take the form of an analysis of verb forms from a script of the listening text or vocabulary or collocation work.

Steps to Teach a Listening Lesson

The EFL teachers can teach a listening lesson easily if they follow the following order:

1. Before:

a.     Determine a reason for listening (Assign a simple task to be done during listening).

b.    Give a general idea of the topic (Say the title & introduce the topic).

c.     Identify the type of the speech (conversation, radio ad, passage, …) and the functions included in the text (persuade, request …)

d.    Present and practice the lexis included in the text.

e.     Ask students to predict the information they will listen to.

f.      Activate background information & build some more knowledge related to the listening text.

2. During:

Show & point to a visual support to assist the meaning.

3. After:

Elicit the answer for the pre-assigned task and then give some more exercises or activities to check students’ understanding of the information included in the listening text.

Reference: 

Summery of Mr. Mohammed Ahmed Abdulammer.