TEACHING LISTENING

TEACHING LISTENING

Composed to fulfill one of the assignments of

TEFL (Teaching English as Foreign Language) Lecture

Handled by  

Jihat Norrahman, SS

By GROUP 2

o   Mery Ariansyah

o   Ovilatul Apriliyah

o   Hasanatin Natifah

o   Faiza Arif Asyrof

o   Indah Wulandari

o   Hindwatur Robiah

INSTITUTE OF TEACHER TRAINING AND EDUCATION

SUMENEP ASSOCIATION OF INDONESIAN TEACHERS

TRUNOJOYO STREET, GEDUNGAN - SUMENEP

 APRIL, 2014

INTRODUCTION

A new series of English textbooks for students have been used in Indonesian schools for some years and there has been a lot of feedback from teachers who have used them. One of the problems they face is that they are not satisfied with their teaching of listening. Although they have been trying to find ways to make their listening activities more effective, the results they obtain are not as good as what they want.

Some conclusions have been made to explain the situation. Many teachers stated that the new textbooks which contain a large amount of knowledge, hinder the students’ learning. Others stated that they have many weak students who lack vocabulary, grammatical knowledge and have poor pronunciation, reduce classroom learning potential learning environment.

In teaching listening comprehension we must be careful not to go to extremes, either by being concerned too exclusively with theories without thinking about their application to teaching, or by obstinately following frozen routines-opening the textbook and explaining new words, playing the tape recorder, and asking/answering questions.

It is essential for a teacher to have an overall understanding of what listening is, why it is difficult for foreign-language learners, and what some solutions may be. The vital question is how to bridge the gap between an analysis of listening and actual classroom teaching.  

Listening Problems

1.      Definition of Listening

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 (Howatt and Dakin 1974). An able listener is capable of doing these four things simultaneously.

Listening plays a vital role in daily lives. People listen for different purposes such as entertainment, academic purposes or obtaining necessary information. In addition, without listening skill, no communication can be achieved. If you cannot hear it well you will find it hard to communicate or perhaps you cannot pass your listening examination for instance.

2.      Listening Problems

According to Yagang (1994), the problems in listening were accompanied with the four following factors: the message, the speaker, the listener and the physical setting.

a)      The Message

Content. Many learners find it more difficult to listen to a taped message than to read the same message on a piece of paper, since the listening passage comes into the ear in the twinkling of an eye, whereas reading material can be read as long as the reader likes. The listening material may deal with almost any area of life. It might include street gossip, proverbs, new products, and situations unfamiliar to the student. Also, in a spontaneous conversation speakers frequently change topics.

The content is usually not well organized. In many cases listeners cannot predict what speakers are going to say, whether it is a news report on the radio, an interviewer’s questions, an everyday conversation, etc. Messages on the radio or recorded on tape cannot be listened to at a slower speed. Even in conversation it is impossible to ask the speaker to repeat something as many times as the interlocutor might like.

Linguistic Features. Liaison (the linking of words in speech when the second word begins with a vowel, e.g., an orange /@nOrIndZ/) and elision (leaving out a sound or sounds, e.g., suppose may be pronounced /sp@uz/ in rapid speech) are common phenomena that make it difficult for students to distinguish or recognize individual words in the stream of speech. They are used to seeing words written as discrete entities in their textbooks.

If listening materials are made up of everyday conversation, they may contain a lot of colloquial words and expressions, such as stuff for material, guy for man, etc., as well as slang. Students who have been exposed mainly to formal or bookish English may not be familiar with these expressions. In spontaneous conversations people sometimes use ungrammatical sentences because of nervousness or hesitation. They may omit elements of sentences or add something redundant. This may make it difficult for the listener to understand the meaning.

b)      The Speaker

Someone or some students who learn English as a foreign language like in Indonesia always tend to use their teacher’s accent. Why can it be? Because almost conversation that they have done or have listened from the teachers themselves. That is why in listening activities the students find some hard things to understand that use other accents (when use a native speakers). It may make it more difficult for beginners to understand what the speaker is saying; on the other hand, it may give advanced students more time to “tune in” to the speaker’s voice and speech style.

c)      The Listener

The first problem students have is they cannot predicting what the speaker is going to say correctly. In fact, the prediction brings about a number of advantages to students in their listening comprehension.  The problem is believed to cause by the habit of listening to word by word. They do not focus on any particular cues which help them predict what is going to be talked about. However, in every listening task, cues are provided indirectly that well-trained or experienced listener could recognize it naturally. For instance, the title of the task can help learners to guess the points coming next. In addition, prediction can be made by photos, maps, charts or anything that provided in the listening. Besides, making questions relating to the listening topic would keep students motivated and improve their comprehension.

The second problem is the limitation of vocabulary power. Some listeners thought that meaning resides within the unfamiliar words so they need a huge amount of vocabulary. On facing a new word, they tend to find out the meaning rather than infer it from the context. The first and most basic strategy is to use the clues which are the words or phrases coming after the unknown words. Nevertheless, students have to make sure that they do not spend much time on guessing the unfamiliar word or they will miss the speaker’s next point.

The third problem is recognizing the main points in listening comprehension. If students cannot obtain any main points, failure will be an inevitable result. the students cannot recognize the main points in a listening because they concentrate too much on listening to word by word. Thus they cannot identify the key words or the content words of the listening tasks.

Discourse marker is considered to be the bridge that leads to the points. It is such a natural thing that the speakers often signal the main points with discourse markers. Different markers with particular expressions keep listeners catch up to the turning points of the task. Marker of addition (in addition, moreover, furthermore, etc) announces a modification or an addition to an idea while marker of cause and sequence (because, due to the fact that, as a result, consequently) informs us the reason and the result of a fact or an action.

Repetition is supposed to be the signal of main points. When a word or phrase is repeated for several times, possibly it covers the important points.

d)      Physical Setting

If the listening task is carried out with noises around, it is for sure they will not have a good result in listening. First, they are distracted by the noise no matter how hard they try to focus on the task. Otherwise, the noise makes a complex of sounds instead of the solo recording being played. This interrupts the students from hearing and focusing on the task.

The problem also comes from the poor quality of the tapes or disks. For example, the cassette may be recorded while there are noises around or the cassette is used for such a long time so the quality is worn out.

The poor equipment is somehow an obstacle to students in listening. For an example, in listening comprehension, it is the best place for students to do the listening in the laboratory room. This somehow will bring out the better result for the noises outside cannot get through the lab room. A good cassette recorder or a CD player may give them the better rather than that of the old one.

3.      What teachers can do to help students master the difficulties

Not all the problems described above can be overcome. Certain features of the message and the speaker, for instance, are inevitable. But this does not mean that the teacher can do nothing about them. S/he can at least provide the students with suitable listening materials, background and linguistic knowledge, enabling skills, pleasant classroom conditions, and useful exercises to help them discover effective listening strategies. Here are a few helpful ideas:

The Message:

1)      Grade listening materials according to the students’ level, and provide authentic materials rather than idealized, filtered samples. It is true that natural speech is hard to grade and it is difficult for students to identify the different voices and cope with frequent overlaps. Nevertheless, the materials should progress step by step from semi-authenticity that displays most of the linguistic features of natural speech to total authenticity, because the final aim is to understand natural speech in real life.

2)      Design task-oriented exercises to engage the students’ interest and help them learn listening skills subconsciously. Listening exercises are most effective if they are constructed round a task. That is to say, the students are required to do something in response to what they hear that will demonstrate their understanding. Some of tasks that you can doare expressing agreement or disagreement, taking notes, marking a picture or diagram according to instructions, and answering questions. Compared with traditional multiple-choice questions, task- based exercises have an obvious advantage: they not only test the students’ listening comprehension but also encourage them to use different kinds of listening skills and strategies to reach their destination in an active way.

3)      Provide students with different kinds of input, such as lectures, radio news, films, TV plays, announcements, everyday conversation, interviews, storytelling, English songs, and so on.

4)      Try to find visual aids or draw pictures and diagrams associated with the listening topics to help students guess or imagine actively.

The Speaker:

1)      Give practice in liaisons and elisions in order to help students get used to the acoustic forms of rapid natural speech. It is useful to find rapidly uttered colloquial collocations and ask students to imitate native speakers’ pronunciation.

2)      Make students aware of different native-speaker accents. Of course, strong regional accents are not suitable for training in listening, but in spontaneous conversation native speakers do have certain accents. Moreover, the American accent is quite different from the British and Australian. Therefore, it is necessary to let students deal with different accents, especially in extensive listening.

3)      Select short, simple listening texts with little redundancy for lower-level students and complicated authentic materials with more redundancy for advanced learners.

The Listener:

1)      Provide background knowledge and linguistic knowledge, such as complex sentence structures and colloquial words and expressions, as needed.

2)      Give, and try to get, as much feedback as possible. Throughout the course the teacher should bridge the gap between input and students’ response and between the teacher’s feedback and students’ reaction in order to keep activities purposeful. It is important for the listening-class teacher to give students immediate feedback on their performance. This not only promotes error correction but also provides encouragement. It can help students develop confidence in their ability to deal with listening problems. Student feedback can help the teacher judge where the class is going and how it should be guided.

3)      Help students develop the skills of listening with anticipation, listening for specific information, listening for gist, interpretation and inference, listening for intended meaning, listening for attitude, etc.

4.      The keys to better listening

There are some keys to be better listener in listening activity. They are:

1)      Understand what makes us hard to understand

The great number of vowels and diphtongs in English. Some of them are similar to each other. Look at the examples of minimal pairs below:

Minimal pairs                    Boat                            –                     Bought

                                                Mad                             –                     Mud

                                                Man                             –                     Main

Than                            –                     Then

Three                           –                     Tree

Two                             –                     Too

Bed                             –                     Bad

2)      Improve Pronunciation

a)      Decide what kind of accent you would like to speak with

There are many different kinds of English accents. The two most common are British and American. There are many different accents even within British or American pronunciation, but most learning materials will help you learn either a standard British accent or a standard American accent. American pronunciation and British pronunciation are completely different.

b)      Learn the IPA and the individual sounds of English

The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is a collection of symbols that represent the different sounds of a language. When you know all the sounds of English and the symbols that represent those sounds, you will be able to pronounce any word in English.

c)      When you learn a new word, learn how to pronounce it correctly

The longer you say a word incorrectly, the harder it becomes to learn to say it correctly. This is why it is so important to learn the IPA and use dictionaries specifically for English learners.

d)      Try to imitate spoken English

To ‘imitate’ means to copy someone/something, to do something the same way, or to do the same things as someone else. Do you really like the way someone speaks English? Try to copy the way they speak.

Do you ever try to make fun of someone from another part of your country by imitating his accent? That’s what you need to do in English.

This is a great activity to try: Close your eyes while you’re listening to something in English (podcasts, songs, TV shows, movies, etc.). Listen carefully to what the speaker is saying and try to make the same sounds. Hear the sounds, don’t try to see the words. Choose a word or sentence, and listen to it many time.

3)      Learn primarily with your ears not your eyes

Listening to the radio / video as much as possible. Automaticaly, it can increase your listening capability. Belive or not, if you do the activity that is stated above in you daily routine, you will face your listening test or task in easier way.

5.      Modern methods of teaching listening skills

Effective, modern methods of teaching listening skills encompass everything from interactive exercises to multimedia resources. Whether you are working with a large group of students or a small one, you can use any of the following examples to develop your own methods for teaching students how to listen well.

• Interpersonal Activities

One effective and nonthreatening way for students to develop stronger listening skills is through interpersonal activities, such as mock interviews and storytelling.

• Group Activities

Larger group activities also serve as a helpful method for teaching listening skills to students. For the first part, divide students into groups of five or larger and instruct them to learn one hobby or interest of at least two other group members. Encourage them to ask clarifying questions during the activity, and you may allow them to take notes if helpful. However, as time passes and their skills grow, you should limit students to only writing notes after the completion of the first part of the group activity. For the second part, have the students sit in a large circle, and then have each individual student share the name and the hobby or interest of the group members that she or he met. This second part of the group activity can also lend itself to additional listening exercises.

• Audio Segments

You can also teach listening skills through audio segments of radio programs, online podcasts, instructional lectures and other audio messages.

• Video Segments

Another helpful resource for teaching listening skills are video segments, including short sketches, news programs, documentary films, interview segments, and dramatic and comedic material. As with audio segments, select the portion and length of the video segment based on the skill level of your students. take time to discuss as a group how the segment compares with the students' expectations.

• Instructional Tips

Whatever method you use for teaching listening, keep a few key instructional tips in mind that will help both you and your students navigate the learning process. One, keep your expectations simple, as even the most experienced listener would be unable to completely and accurately recall the entirety of a message. Two, keep your directions accessible and build in opportunities for students not only to ask clarifying questions, but also to make mistakes. Three, help students navigate their communication anxiety by developing activities appropriate to their skill and confidence level, and then strengthen their confidence by celebrating the ways in which they do improve, no matter how small.

SUGGESTION

Firstly to the students, they should spend much more time on practicing. They should listen to a variety of topics in order to get familiar with them. Hence, the background knowledge will be enriched as well as the skill. In addition, the students should know to apply suitable strategies to each kind of listening text in order to get the best result.

It is suggested that  a variety of exercises, tasks, and activities appropriate to different stages of a listening lesson (pre-listening, while-listening, and post-listening). Good classroom activities can themselves be effective solutions to listening problems. The list covers a wide range of listening activities from simple to more sophisticated. Some teachers, accustomed to following exactly the exercises and tasks provided in the textbook without thinking about whether they are suitable for their students or not, might look on these activities as extra work and a burden.

It is a pleasure and a positive experience to try various exercises, tasks, and classroom activities, for successful lessons depend on the teacher’s knowing and using a variety of teaching methods. Teachers should have at their fingertips a set of exercises, tasks, and activities that they can use with their classes whenever they may be needed.

CONCLUSION

Modern text books are awfully clever in the way they slip seamlessly from an interesting listening text into explanation and practice of a grammar point. It is hard to see how such a system could possibly be worse that just launching into a grammar point- until, that is, your students have listened three times and still haven't understood enough to answer the first question.

Some teachers think that listening is the easiest skill to teach, whereas most students think it is the most difficult to improve. This contradiction tells us that there are some things about teaching listening that need to be explored. Perhaps those who say it is “the easiest to teach” mean that it does not require much painstaking lesson preparation and all they need to do is play the tapes and test the students’ comprehension. But is there nothing more to teaching listening than testing? We must find out all we can about how listening can be improved and what activities are useful to this end and then use this knowledge and these activities in our own classrooms.

 

REFERENCES

http://www.usingenglish.com/articles/why-your-students-have-problems-with-       listening-comprehension.htm

http://busyteacher.org/14411-how-to-teach-listening-skills-best-practices.html

http://www.englishteachermelanie.com/study-tip-how-to-improve-your-english-     pronunciation/

http://classroom.synonym.com/modern-methods-teaching-listening-skills- 2458.html