ELTWeekly Vol. 5 Issue#29 | August 12, 2013 | ISSN 0975-3036
* This paper is submitted for publication by Prof. Madhu Kewlani.
Abstract
English as a second language refers to English using situations in which English is the language of public life for speakers of other languages at home. In a multi-lingual country like India, the mother tongue is used for immediate needs and early education, but to be able to reach out to the majority of people around the world, one has to be well equipped with the English language. The general language competence of a learner is formed as and when he gets exposed to a number of languages being used around him and being heard by him. Therefore, listening becomes the most important activity for proper and quick competence in the language.
Although listening has been a relatively neglected skill in terms of how it is introduced to language learners, it is now beginning to receive more attention. With this view, an exercise was conducted with a group of 20 students preparing for their IELTS and TOEFL tests. The article shares a process for helping learners develop their listening skills and gives practical suggestions for further improvement.
Introduction
For too long listening has been relegated to a secondary position in the English Language Teaching classroom. This stems, in part, from the fact that whereas a considerable amount of research has been conducted into reading, writing and speaking- research, which has influenced our approaches to teaching language and has also influenced how textbooks have been written- there has been a lack of research interest into listening. Some of the reasons for this lack of research interest come from the fact that speaking was always considered a more “valuable” skill to focus on in the classroom; that researchers and teachers have often considered that listening was something which could just be “picked up”; and as researchers and teachers had not been taught listening themselves, they saw little need for developing a scientific research agenda or approaches to teaching listening. It is indeed interesting that listening has not received wider attention in the past given that it is the language skill most often used in everyday life. More than 40% of our daily communication time is spent on listening, 35% on speaking, 16% on reading and only 9% on writing.
Although listening has been a relatively neglected skill in terms of how it is introduced to language learners, it is now beginning to receive more attention. There is now a greater awareness among teachers that we have to help learners develop their listening skills, rather than rely on the skill developing itself. The question of how to help learners develop effective listening skills brings attention to the methods we use and the type of materials we introduce our learners to. The aim of all listening lessons should be to allow learners a greater degree of independence when confronted with listening to the foreign language in a real world context.
Exercise
With this view, an exercise was conducted with a group of 20 students preparing for their IELTS and TOELF tests. In the rest of this article, I would like to share a process for helping learners develop their listening skills and suggest as to how this might be achieved with the narration of stories from English Literature.
The listening exercises were divided into three main parts: Pre-listening, While-listening and Post-listening activities. It proved useful in taking the attention off continually testing listening and allowed learners to do other things with the information that they listened to. As a pre-listening task, a short discussion with the learners was initiated as to what they thought about narration and listening to stories (activating world and personal knowledge)
Then the learners were asked to use whatever information they gathered from the narration to have an extended discussion in the post-listening stage (allowing for more individualization and critical comments to be developed)
In between these two stages, learners were helped to focus on their listening by careful selection of tasks that were meaningful and catered to developing specific listening skills, rather than on constantly measuring performance through test-like exercises.
The texts chosen for narration were- Gulliver’s Travels, Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Tess of the D’Urbervilles, David Copperfield, The Arabian Nights Entertainments and Mill on the Floss.
Observations
The narration of six stories was done in four days. In the first two sessions, it was observed that the narration couldn’t hold their attention for long, they felt inhibited to talk and participate and that they found another narration by a peer more interesting than mine. At the same time, the follow-up tasks were done quite positively. In the following two sessions, the concentration level of the group increased, because of their familiarity with the exercise and the element of interest being infused.100% listening comprehension was observed. While-listening and post-listening tasks were taken up positively and familiarity with the exercises led to an increased response. The learners were made to fill a feedback form wherein majority of them agreed to the fact that along with their listening skills, the speaking skills had also improved.
Richer Learning Experiences
With the increased awareness of the need to help second language learners develop effective listening skills and with the greater availability of technology nowadays, more creative ways of teaching listening in and out of the classroom can be explored. Once we begin to explore the possibilities, we offer a richer language learning experience to our learners and create good listeners into the bargain.
Practical Suggestions
When preparing learners for academic listening English language teachers often choose to use textbooks with a title like-Academic Listening: preparing students for lectures. Such textbooks are widely used on pre-session courses and many students and their teachers diligently work their way through the textbook in the belief that they are preparing for the real thing.
After having compared my conventional classroom teaching with that of narration of stories to learners, it was observed that:
- The narrations were structured at the micro level of discourse; there were lots of uses of ‘and’, ‘so’, ‘but’ etc., many pauses with the use of “ah” “er”. On the other hand, textbook lectures have complete clauses and fewer pauses.
- The narrations contained many false starts, redundancies and repetitions. None of these are found in textbooks.
- A variety of extra linguistic features such as body movements and kinesics were applied. The textbook lessons do not have this.
- An attempt was made to establish a rapport with the students by a) personalizing many of the references b) trying to make the narrations non-threatening and empathizing with the listeners c) checking that the listeners were following the narrations.
References
- Buck.G. 2000, Assessing listening. Cambridge: C.U.P.
- Flowerdew.J.and Miller.I., Second language listening comprehension: Theory to Practice, N.Y.:C.U.P.
- Miller Lindsay. Developing listening skills with authentic materials.
- Nunan.D. and L.Miller, eds.1995.New ways in Teaching Listening: Alexandria, V.A: TESOL
- Yule,G.1985, The study of language, Cambridge:C.U.P.