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.

Goals and Techniques for Teaching Listening

Instructors want to produce students who, even if they do not have complete control of the grammar or an extensive lexicon, can fend for themselves in communication situations. In the case of listening, this means producing students who can use listening strategies to maximize their comprehension of aural input, identify relevant and non-relevant information, and tolerate less than word-by-word comprehension.

Focus: The Listening Process

To accomplish this goal, instructors focus on the process of listening rather than on its product
By raising students' awareness of listening as a skill that requires active engagement, and by explicitly teaching listening strategies, instructors help their students develop both the ability and the   confidence to handle communication situations they may encounter beyond the classroom. In this way they give their students the foundation for communicative competence in the new language.

Integrating Metacognitive Strategies

Before listening: Plan for the listening task

1. Set a purpose or decide in advance what to listen for
2. Decide if more linguistic or background knowledge is needed
3. Determine whether to enter the text from the top down (attend to the overall meaning) or from the bottom up (focus on the words and phrases)

During and after listening: Monitor comprehension

1. Verify predictions and check for inaccurate guesses
2. Decide what is and is not important to understand
3. Listen/view again to check comprehension
4. Ask for help

After listening: Evaluate comprehension and strategy use

1. Evaluate comprehension in a particular task or area
2. Evaluate overall progress in listening and in particular types of listening tasks
3. Decide if the strategies used were appropriate for the purpose and for the task
4. Modify strategies if necessary

Than, this is the strategies to Strategies for Developing Listening Skills

Teaching Listening download here source : http://www.nclrc.org

Teaching Listening 2012-07-14T03:13:00-07:00 Rating: 4.5 Diposkan Oleh: admin