FOR the students, guided practice by a teacher is one of the best ways to improve their listening skill. A student with good listening comprehension skills will be able to participate more effectively in communicative situations. Here are some guidelines for teachers:
The Purpose Should Be Made Clear to the Students
When the learning objective of a language class is explained to students, they can better focus on specific vocabulary acquisition, grammar practice, listening for different purposes, and so on.
Progression of Listening Comprehension Activities
Here are some ideas for the suggested progression of learning activities.
1. Warm-up Activity: The teacher could ask students questions like "What do you do every day?"
2. Listening Comprehension Activity: The teacher could design a listening comprehension activity, such as two people having a conversation about their daily life.
3. Controlled Practice: An example of a controlled practice activity could be a drill activity that models the same structure or vocabulary.
4. Open-ended Listening/Speaking Activity: An open-ended activity could allow students to have the freedom to practise listening comprehension and speaking, such as interviewing other members in the class about their daily life.
Teaching Methodology Considerations
If a teacher always uses the same teaching methodology, he or she may become predictable and, perhaps, less interesting for his students. It is important to vary techniques in order to challenge students.
Barriers to Acquiring Listening Strategies for EFL Learners
THIS study looks into the barriers that inhibit EFL learners from acquiring listening comprehension strategies during strategy training. Results find that learners have the following barriers.
Barrier category 1: Affective barriers
Some affective influence might distract learners from learning the target strategies. The affective factors that play a negative role in strategy acquisition include anxiety, distress, frustration and resistance.
Barrier category 2: Habitual barriers
Some learners reported that they were more inclined to resort to their former listening habits, than to try the listening strategies introduced in the training. Although not all of the former listening habits disadvantaged comprehension, some did draw learners away from activating the potential strategies in the comprehension process. The habitual barriers were listening for every spoken word, non-purposeful listening, etc.
Barrier category 3: Information processing barriers
Learners reported that the obstacles in strategy use that were complicated by spoken-word recognition problems. Some were having trouble with the matching task between the pronunciation of the spoken words and the words they already knew. Others were unable to recall the meanings of the spoken words. And, there were also learners who experienced both obstacles.
Barrier category 4: Material barriers
Learners were more inclined to practise strategies with materials that were not too difficult for them. If the materials were above the listeners' level to a certain degree, complaints were often made about the difficulties of strategy use or the listening process.
TEACHERS should select tasks that are "authentic". Real tasks mean what real native speakers would do if they are listening to a similar text. Learners should not always listen for the sole purpose of answering true or false questions or multiple choice questions. These are all sound means of testing ability, but teachers don't improve their students' ability by testing it, they only ascertain students' level of development.
Teachers should bear this in mind when they set tasks for students. The purpose of the text should define the task teachers assign their students and in doing so they develop students' abilities to understand what they hear rather than just achieving a score.
Teachers should also try to use an authentic approach. Language is a constantly developing form and when we listen in our native language we still hear words that are new to us. This doesn't lead us to check lists of unknown words in dictionaries or learn word lists before we listen. We have evolved a process of deducing the meaning of new words. This is a process teachers also need to develop in their students. By constantly pre-teaching and preparing students， teachers are undermining the development of this process. Students need to be challenged and to struggle to find meaning for themselves, with teachers' guidance and support, in order to develop this ability.
TEACHERS should keep in mind that listening is an active process. Asking learners to listen and remember can make them anxious, place a great strain on their memory and tend not to develop listening skills.
The teacher would support learners' understanding more effectively, if they direct their pupils' attention to specific points that have to be listened for using activities that actively support learners' understanding and guide their attention to specific parts of the spoken text.
These are some of the things teachers should consider when they try to develop the students' listening.
* They should give the children confidence and should not expect them to always understand every word they hear.
* Explain to learners why they have to listen. Make sure the learners are clear about why they are listening, what the purpose of the activity is.
* Help learners develop specific strategies for listening. An important strategy that the teacher should teach is "intelligent guesswork". Pupils are used to drawing on their background knowledge to work out something they are not sure of.
* Set specific listening tasks. Teachers should try to think of listening in three stages, pre-listening, while-listening, post-listening and have activities for each stage.
* Listening does not have to rely on the availability of a cassette or pre-recorded material. Most listening is teacher talk.
What teachers can do to make themselves be more comprehensible? Here are some suggestions.
* Keep the sentences they speak short and grammatically simple.
* Use exaggerated intonation to hold the learners' attention.
* Emphasize key words.
* Limit the topics to what is familiar to the learners.
Loading ...
