Teaching Listening
Listening is the language modality that is used most frequently. It has been estimated that adults spend almost half their communication time listening, and students may receive as much as 90% of their in-school information through listening to instructors and to one another. Often, however, language learners do not recognize the level of effort that goes into developing listening ability.
Far from passively receiving and recording aural input, listeners actively involve themselves in the interpretation of what they hear, bringing their own background knowledge and linguistic knowledge to bear on the information contained in the aural text. Not all listening is the same; casual greetings, for example, require a different sort of listening capability than do academic lectures. Language learning requires intentional listening that employs strategies for identifying sounds and making meaning from them.
Listening involves a sender (a person, radio, television), a message, and a receiver (the listener). Listeners often must process messages as they come, even if they are still processing what they have just heard, without backtracking or looking ahead. In addition, listeners must cope with the sender's choice of vocabulary, structure, and rate of delivery. The complexity of the listening process is magnified in second language contexts, where the receiver also has incomplete control of the language.
Given the importance of listening in language learning and teaching, it is essential for language teachers to help their students become effective listeners. In the communicative approach to language teaching, this means modeling listening strategies and providing listening practice in authentic situations: those that learners are likely to encounter when they use the language outside the classroom.
Material for this section was drawn from “Listening in a foreign language” by Ana Maria Schwartz, in Modules for the professional preparation of teaching assistants in foreign languages (Grace Stovall Burkart, ed.; Washington, DC: Center for Applied Linguistics, 1998)
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ReplyDeleteThe first step that we have to take into account at the moment of teaching listening is, to select appropriate activities in which learners can feel motivated in participating inside the classroom also, there are some interesting activities in which the teacher can apply to their students such as: To speak in English as much as possible or the language that they wish to learn, to listen English musics, to watch English movies and other activities that could be taken for practicing in the classroom
ReplyDeleteFor developing listening is necessary to listen a lot of conversations when people use the target language,teachers must have several resources for teaching this skill and students must pay attention with the words listened,because;perhaps teachers say work and students believe have listened word.One recommendation that I can give is listened american and british programs,because;sometimes the pronunciation of some words are different better,water among others,so,if people learn just one they will not learn the variety of pronunciation.
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