The use of Listening in the foreign language classroom

Lucila Mendoza Reyes

n our daily lives we read and listen to a great deal of language, and it is possible to divide this language into two broad categories: interest and usefulness. Very often we read or listen because it interests us or at least we think it will interest us. Sometimes, however, it is not the fact that a text may be interesting what causes the reader or listener to pay at-tention to it, but its usefulness. For example, to be sure of getting exactly what you wish, instructions for operating a telephone, directories, rules and regulations, texts that are not necesarilly in any way interesting. In real life people listen to language because they want to and they have a purpose for doing so. Listener's purposes could be in order to obtain general information, specific information, or because of cultural interest, lexical items, use and meaning of structural items. The best way to expose students to spoken English is the teacher then it is through the use of taped material which can exemplify a wide range of topics such as advertisements, new broadcasts, poetry reading, plays, songs and speeches in a classroom.

Classroom listening is not real-life listening. So it is very important to provide students with training in listening comprehension that will prepare them for effective functioning outside the classroom. Activities should give learners practice in coping with at least some of the features of real-life-situations. They will be more motivating and interesting to do than contrived textbook comprehension exercises. Penny Ur said,

Putting aside, for the moment, the criterion "nearness to real-life listening", let us consider these guidelines from the point of view of practical classroom teaching. […] one pedagogical advantage of "real-life" listening situations as a basis for comprehension exercises is that these are motivating to do. […] a disadvantage of the guideline 'single exposure' is that it might conflict with your desire to let your students more than once in order to give them more practice, prevent frustration and give them another chance to succeed in doing the task. 1

Some of my students have problems to catch the actual sounds of the foreign language; understand every word which make them feel worried and stressed; understand fast, natural native-sounding speech; keep up with all the information they get and they can not predict.

There could be many causes for these problems. For example, a particular sound may not exist in the mother tongue, so the learner is not used to perceiving it and therefore does not catch the actual sound of the foreign language.  To understand every word is a common problem, perhaps, we as teachers fostered it, because unconsciously we encourage the learner to believe that everything that is said bears equal important information. The effort to understand everything often results in ineffective comprehension, as well as a feeling of fatigue and failure. We need to give learners practice in selective ignoring of heard information. Learners can not understand fast, natural native speech, because (it could be) they often ask us to slow down and speak clearly and teacher does it to try to help students. Unfortunatelly, it does not help them to learn to cope with everyday informal speech.

Learners find it difficult to keep up with all the information and they feel overloaded with incoming information. It could be because they do not know how to pick out what is essential and they do not allow themselves to ignore the rest.

To overcome these problems we as teachers can help our students if we teach them how to improve their listening through some skills. The listener employs a number of specialized skills when listening and his success in understanding the content of what he hears depends to a large extent of his expertise in these specialized skills. Some writers such as Jeremy Harmer propose:

1. Predictive skills. The efficient listener predicts what he is going to hear and the process of understanding the text is the process of the text matches up to these predictions as he continuous to listen his predictions will changes he receives more information from the text.

2. Extracting specific information. Very often the listener is involved in the use of receptive skills for the sole purpose of extracting specific information (scanning). In other words, the listener will hear at a piece of the language not in order to understand it all, but for the purpose of finding out only one or two facts.

3. Getting the general picture. Learners often read because they want to get a general picture. It is the main points they are interested in, not the detail. Indeed the skill of listening in order to get the general picture presupposes the reader's ability to pick out the main points and discard the irrelevant or what is only detail. The listener is able to skim rapidly over information that is repeated more than once. It is a vital ability to discard redundant irrelevant and over- detailed information.

4. Inferring opinion attitude. The ability to infer opinion and attitude is largely based on the recognition of linguistic style and its use to achieve appropriate purposes.

5. Deducing meaning from context. Even native speakers often come across words in written and spoken texts that they do not understand. The fact that a word is unknown to them does not cause any particular problem. The point is that the deducing of meanings is important for a language user who will often meet unknown words and we will try to train students in the same way to guess the meaning of unknown words. It should be said of course that for a native speaker or a foreign language user there is a point at which they are not able to deduce meaning from context where there are a great number of words that they do not understand.

6. Recognizing functions and disclosure patterns and markers. It is important to know for example which sentence then backs up that generalization with evidence. It is also important to be able to recognize devices for cohesion and understand how a text is organized coherently.

1. No over response. 'The learners do not have to do anything in response to the   listening; however, facial expression and body language often show if they are following or not'2

2. Short responses. 'Obeying instructions; learners perform actions, or draw shapes or pictures, in response to instructions'.3
   • Ticking off items. Listeners mark or tick off words as they hear them within a spoken description.
   • True/False. Learners write ticks or crosses to indicate whether the statements are right or wrong or make brief responses (True-False).
   • Detecting mistakes. Listeners raise their hands or call out when they hear something wrong.
   • Close. Learners write down what they think might be the missing word.
   • Guessing definitions. The teacher provides brief oral definitions of a person, place, thing; learners write down what they think it is.
   • Skimming and Scanning. Learners are asked to identify some general topic or information (skimming) or certain limited information (scanning).

3. Longer responses
   • Answering questions. They are conveniently given in writing.
   • Note-Taking. Learners take brief notes from a short lecture or talk.
   • Paraphrasing and translating. Learners rewrite the listening text in different words.
   • Summarizing. Learners write a brief summary of the content of the listening passage.
   • Long gap-filling. Learners guess and write down.

4. Extended responses. "The listening is only a 'jump-off point' for extended reading, writing or speaking" in other words, these are 'combined skills' activities.'4
   • Problem-Solving. Learners discuss how to deal with it.
   • Interpretation. The listeners try to guess what is going on from the words, kinds of voices, tone and any other evidence.

Some listening tasks are more difficult than others. Jim, Scrivener said:

An important point is that the students getting the right answer is   not necessarily the most important thing! […] I'm not saying that getting a wrong answer is good! But I'm trying to steer you away from thinking that right answers are the only goal. The goal is the         listening itself. 5

Whether the learner finally gets the right or wrong answer is to some degree irrelevant, because in trying to get the right answer the learner is stretching his powers of listening to the limit. To help students listen better we may use some techniques:

• Keep the recording short. Not more than two minutes or so.

• Play the tape a sufficient number of times.

• Let students discuss their answers together.

• Don't immediately acknowledge correct answer with words or facial expressions-throw the answers back to the class.

• Don't let them lose heart.

It is much better to "Grade the task - not the tape" 6. This means that we as teachers do not worry too much about what level the recording is suitable for, but we should make sure our task is set for the right level.

Finally, we need to reshape some of our listening lessons to encourage the learners to write down the words they understand, to form and discuss inferences, to listen again and revise their inferences, then to check them against what the speaker says next. In doing this, we not only give them practice in the kind of listening they are likely to do in real life; but we also ensure that guessing is not seen as a sign of failure but something that most people have to resort to when listening to a foreign language. So we will not simply provide practice but produce better and more confident listeners.

Notas

Bibliography

• Harmer, Jeremy. How to Teach English, Longman, London and New York, 1991.

• ____. The Practice of English Language Teaching, Longman, London and New York, 1986.

• Ur, Penny. A Course in Language Teaching, C.U.P., Australia, 1996.

• Scrivener, Jim. Learning Teaching, Heinemann, Great Britain, 1994.