Issues in development of listening skills

2.3 Suggestions for Improvement of English Listening Comprehension Teaching among EFL Learners

Listening approach When students need to use their prior knowledge to interpret the text and to create plausible expectations of what they are about to hear, they will activate knowledge-based processing. On the other hand, they also need to decode the linguistic input rapidly and accurately and to map the input against these expectations to confirm consistencies and to refute implausible interpretations which are referred to as text-based processing. It is acknowledged that listening strategies should be integrated explicitly and treated pedagogically to improve listening ability.
Classroom procedure: 1. Preparing students to listen - Students can make use of analogy to predict and interpret language with past similar experiences. They have a range of schemata knowledge about particular people, places, situations and text-types which they can call up and use as points of comparison with what is currently being heard and experienced. Prediction is an important process in English listening. EFL learners use their perception of the key features of context and their knowledge of the world to limit the range of possible utterances they are about to hear. This ability helps students to process the message for deviations from what was expected, reducing their memory load in order to monitor the incoming message more efficiently. At the beginning stage, it is the teachers‘ task to guide students to gradually develop how to predict from the known information of the text. Visual support and transcript are two important sources of support to students. In the form of pictures, graphs, diagrams, maps, etc., the visual support can help students to predict incoming listening materials easily by supplying cultural information. It can provide support by reinforcing the aural message and training them to listen to some difficult specific information. To some students, what is heard is kind of ―sound or ―noise instead of meaningful information and they are very reluctant to pay attention to the overall message but understand every single word. For these reasons a transcript is valuable for it allows students to go back after the initial attempt so that they can check to make sure they can hear and understand everything, increasing their interest and confidence in further listening.
2. Providing students with positive feedback - Providing positive feedback for students means ensuring an experience of success, which helps remove the mental block of the type discussed by Krashen (1982). In contrast, repeated failure can result in a panic and a real psychological barrier to effective listening. If there is a failure for understanding, diagnosing the cause of the failure is so important that remedial action can be taken. Neglecting the failure for a moment is unreasonable for it pushes students to slide into confusion and even into further failure.3. Raising meta-cognitive awareness Students are capable of observing their own cognitive processes in their listening and also verbalizing their theories about learning to listen in English. The listening notes by students and pre-listening and post-listening discussions are very helpful in this sense. These activities are very useful by involving students in thinking, not just about the content of listening, but more importantly, about the process of listening. By doing so, they can have chances to share with one another’s thoughts and strategies so that they can improve their own listening ability. More importantly, they will be aware of what leads to their success and failure and then work out their own effective strategies in listening.³²
Suggestions on Textbooks and Teacher’s Books - Teacher‘s books should introduce some information about theories on listening training, so that teachers can base their teaching on these necessary theories. The information can cover the nature of listening, such as information processing, listening strategies, problems students may face, and how to solve them.(2) Listening teaching should be a student-training program covering all listening strategies identified to be involved in listening, which should be systematic. Detailed information of the strategies to be practiced should be given for both teachers‘ benefits and students‘ benefits. Suggestions about how to teach each strategy should be as complete as possible, so that even new teachers can have a good lesson plan.(3) Discourse processing should be encouraged from the very beginning, which is also the way students naturally process a listening text. So the first thing students are asked to do with a text should be to consider it as a whole. Then, exercises can gradually involve more detailed comprehension by analyzing the text to a greater depth.(4) Textbooks and teacher‘s books should provide or at least suggest a framework of activities which are integrated with listening strategies: pre-listening, while-listening and post-listening. As the words pre-listening, while-listening and post-listening show, they are to be performed at three different stages in the classroom teaching of a listening text. Pre-listening activities can be subdivided into readiness activities‖ and guidance activities (Medley, 1977). Readiness activities‖ aim at activating students‘ prior knowledge by reading the title, new words of the text, sometimes by looking at the pictures given before the exercises in textbooks, and also by asking provocative questions or introducing some background knowledge. Guidance activities‖ are intended to guide students‘ attention to specific aspects of language input by letting them bear certain purposes in mind in advance, that is to say, letting students know what task or tasks they are going to do with the text, or letting students themselves decide what they want to do with the text.³³ As these exercises are designed for students to practice certain strategies, at the beginning stage, teachers should present students with the value and purpose of these strategies, and teach them how to use the strategies and monitor their own use as one part of guidance activities. In the second stage of classroom teaching, while-listening activities are designed for students to practice those strategies considered beneficial when actually receiving acoustic input, and to help to develop a good habit of actively participating in the understanding process instead of just passively receiving what is coming into the ears. At the beginning of strategy training, one activity usually focuses on one strategy so that students can have a good practice of this certain strategy and make full use of it in listening. As time goes by, activities are then designed to integrate with these strategies. By constant controlled practice with strategies integrated with one listening activity, students will gradually have an effective automatic processing of being able to listen to texts by using various listening strategies, and will thus greatly improve their listening ability. The final stage of teaching a text involves post-listening activities, which cover two kinds of activities: ―comprehension activities‖ (Medley, 1977) and evaluation activities. Comprehension activities focus on checking understanding of English itself and interpretation of the text. Students are asked to do some question-oriented exercises, which test students‘ comprehension and memory, and the questions are usually offered by textbooks. Evaluation activities aim at developing students‘ self-evaluation strategy in order to make them more efficient listeners. In order to let students have a chance to practice oral English in a functional situation, we can have one more kind of post-listening activities: production activities, which are intended to promote students‘ oral ability.³⁴