Chapter 1 Listening
Listening in the Classroom
The baby was born a short time ago. He senses the love of his mother and recognizes her voice. He is bombarded with many different types of sounds, many of which he doesn't understand. In time, he begins to make distinctions between the sounds. Over the first few months of his life, his eyes begin to focus; he recognizes those closest to him. He slowly comes to understand the words from his mother and father and other close family members.
Listening in a second language
When listening in English for the first time, many adult second language learners have great difficulty distinguishing one word from the next. Like the infant in the example, they eventually are able to differentiate individual words and phrases. This understanding develops over time with regular exposure to the language.
Unlike the infant, though, adults learning a second language have certain advantages. They have developed cognitive skills that allow them to reason and think about things they see and hear. Adult learners also have life experiences and background knowledge (or schema) which aid them in understanding a given message.
In other words, when we listen to something being said, we're not just hearing the words. We bring to the experience certain knowledge we have about the topic being discussed. We also make inferences based on body language, facial expressions, and the context in which the exchange is occurring. This, in turn, influences how we understand what the speaker is saying.
Authenticity
Much has been written about authentic listening tasks in the ESL/EFL classroom. The fact is that only limited authentic practice can be accomplished in the classroom. Authentic listening includes listening to speech with natural repetition, unplanned background noises, starts and stops, incomplete sentences, fast as well as slow speech in the same utterances, possibly ungrammatical phrases, etc.
Many textbooks don't address authenticity. Most of the time, listenings prepared especially for ESL/EFL students feature individuals who enunciate every word clearly and speak in complete sentences, often with no background noise present. The pace is sometimes slow, but always controlled. There are no natural repetitions, nor stops and starts as is common in everyday speech.
An instructor can bring "real" listening to class by recording a television show or news broadcast. This authentic experience is very useful if presented in a purposeful way.
An instructor can bring "real" listening to class by recording a television show or news broadcast. This authentic experience is very useful if presented in a purposeful way.
The instructor should also conduct the class in English and not in another language, even in EFL classes. With few exceptions, the language spoken should be at a natural pace and not adjusted for student understanding. Again, it is essential to do this in order to provide authentic listening.
It's also important to remember that there are various types of listening, all of which cannot be fully addressed in the classroom: listening for academic purposes, for enjoyment, or for social interaction. Social interaction might be formal or informal or a combination of the two. Interaction might be to persuade, complain, infer, etc. The list goes on and on.
Listening strategies
There are only limited opportunities to engage in authentic listening in the classroom. In addition, instructors can only give a few examples of the many different types of listening there are. So what can be done to help students become better and more confident listeners in English? The answer is to teach listening strategies.
Listening strategies provide learners with tools they can use to listen and understand spoken discourse in a variety of contexts. Every listening activity in class should help learners develop listening strategies and should be accompanied by a task.
Ultimately, all listening activities, whatever their purpose, should include certain elements to ensure student success.
Listening activities should include the following:
|
|
In the chapters that follow, we'll examine different listening strategies and will look at tasks and activities that you can use to help your learners become more confident listeners in English.
very interesting
ResponderEliminarFOR MY HE TOPIC IS VERY INTESTING BUT I THINK THE CONTEX IN THE CLASS ROOM ISN´T APROPIAE FOR THE LEARNING ENGLISH, ESPECIALLY WHEN IN TRUE CONTEXT HAS DIFFERENT SONG FOR EXAMPLE:
ResponderEliminarCAR, PEOPLE TALKING, BIRDS AND THINK LIKE THAT.
TREU CONTEX FOR LEARNING ENGLISH GOING BE A CONSTANT PRACTICE. I LIKE THIS TEXS
My name is Emmanuel
ResponderEliminarI am concerned about listening comprehension because, from my point of view, it is one of the most difficult skills to develop as future English teachers and I consider that the work accomplished inside classroom should establish real patterns of communication.
Moreover, I know level of students sometimes presents variability and because of this, head teacher has to speak in mother tongue in order to ensure comprehension from the class, nevertheless, my possible question would be: when “we” the students of basic level will face real communicative situations and will get from some dialogue a meaningful message?
In addition, as future teachers, we have to practice listening exercises in order to improve this skill, and for that reason it is so important take place in real situations and try to recreate, inside classroom, social practices of language, with particular spaces and certain patterns of vocabulary that allow us a real and active practice English language. After that, receive some listening and analyze them in order to identify some elements for instance: space and time, audience, topic and so forth which indicate comprehension patterns in order to find out the real meaning of some dialogue.
We are still students but instead of using translation as main element of comprehension, we have to use last elements in order to identify what about the speaker is talking or what he or she pretends with the dialogue from a previous training about this through techniques and tasks given by head teacher.
I'm Marilu:
ResponderEliminarIn my opinion, the reading was good and I think that it mentions a reality that happen when we (as learners) are listening in English for the first time because we are unfamiliar with the new sounds as the baby mentioned above in the text.
It´s the same situation! As the text mentions we have a lot of difficulties to catch the words from the texts but, this may be changing by the time and interaction with the second language, (in this case English).
Also our experiences and background knowledge about the topic, the body language and facial expressions that speaker use to express ideas, and the context can be helping us to understand the messages.
I remember when I started to study English and I didn’t understand anything! I felt strange because I wasn’t used to listening English.
And at one moment I was very confused about it, because I thought that English language was and had to like Spanish, word by word to understand everything but it was not, only I needed to catch the main idea, topic from the text or the speakers is saying or they want to say.
In addition, if we try to translate all the text or conversation, we couldn´t develop cognitive skills for making inferences about these. For this reason we must continually work with the listening and practice until our ear gets used and especially we must be in contact with the language.
On the other hand Authentic listening tasks in classroom that the text mentions is other important tool that helps us to practice with the language because all of these tasks are authentic experiences that improve our capacity for listening English.
I think that all activities that we do during the class must have an organization and purpose too, because if our activity is not clear students not understand the purpose and they couldn´t do the activity and it will be very confusing and boring for them.
Finally every listening activity in class helps to us as learners develop listening strategies that are very useful to understand spoken discourse in different contexts. And it is that we need to develop in our students: “listening strategies”.
i like your class. I HOPE LEARNING MORE ABOUT ENGLISH AND IMPROVE MY LISTENING . I LIKE LISTENING ACTIVITIES BECAUSE HELP ME A LOT.WELL LET`S DOING....
ResponderEliminarI think the most difficult skill to understand, develop and use mostly and practice is learning comprehension. It's difficult but not impossible.
ResponderEliminarThe reading is interesting, a little confused but interesting.
As listeners, Listening comprehension in the classroom is an opportunity to know the variety of speech from different speakers in different context.
About listening in a second language, I think a child is best than an adult to know new words with the correct pronunciation, although an adult has more knowledge about listening comprehension than a child, but a child has a clean mind and his/her mind could start learning without easy mistakes than an adult does.
Another thing is the authenticity, where it is useful to develop the listening comprehension as many as possible without forget the principal way to develop it... practice!
Different strategies help us to understand and develop in different context the listening skill.
I like it!
by: Stephania Nataly González Vásquez
I think that is very interesting this test, because help us to understand which is the purpose of the class. About that is important understand the language as a future teacher is important to develop communication skills so that later we can express ourselves in and out of the classroomwith our students helping them understand the language.
ResponderEliminarby: Maribel de la O
the difficulty that we have to face to learn a second languaje is because we use boring methods.
ResponderEliminarThat is wy I think the approach of this text is very interesting.
We need bring to the students autentic situations for learn, it will be a great motivation for them.
the autentic resourses will be a tool for learn and it can be modifiable depending on the learning needs of students.
YARITZA GARCES
My name is Adolfo
ResponderEliminarhello teacher.I don´t know what happend with my comentary that I wrote last Friday. but anyway.
It is said that the learn of a new Foreing language it´s kinf of difficult because the ways to speak are completly different, but the most important task is the meaning of we want to say.
In this article says that the way that you speak is going to provide many tools in order to do a better understanding of the language spoken.
What we have to do is to learn a better way to speak or to communicate what we are saying. there are many strategies that can be helpfull in the speech in the classroom.
Most of this categories can be used in different ways depending the situation or the moment with students; But that will be a very important task that we will have to apply with our students.
Este comentario ha sido eliminado por el autor.
ResponderEliminarlearning a second language is difficult but we have to imporsible praticar by how little we learn.
ResponderEliminarThere are different types of voice and ways to explain the meaning of a message is difficult to understand.
nancy korina
María del Rocío Gutiérrez Tenorio
ResponderEliminarI think that learning another language is difficult. When you're a kid, you learn by repetition and imitation but when you're older, it is harder acquire it for all the prior knowledge of the person.
For example, is difficult for me to hear different accents of English. In the classroom and in some American series understand, but to face a test, blocking me. I believe this has to do with the little contact I have had with the language. In secondary school and high school, my approach was sparse, and this has much to do.
I put myself in the place of the teacher, I remember listening secondary school was what most rejected, and that was because as I understood, preferred to lock it. Now I must consider strategies to listen first for me, try and make them work for later students to practice with.
This is a skill which is more difficult to learn a language as well as speaking.
I hope to acquire this skill, it worries me much develop it.
In my opinion I think it important to take as important the skill of listening and put it into practice in our daily lives, since as the article says, the listening have begun it to develop from our mother's womb and it is necessary that we apply to the learning of English, since as future teachers we need to complete this ability so that we get good and excellent results throughout our working field.
ResponderEliminarMy name is ARIADNA ELIZABETH ABUNDIS VILLEGAS
Este comentario ha sido eliminado por el autor.
ResponderEliminarLearning to speak a new language is a great purpose that involves analyzing and understanding what is meant, so I think that this reading is very important and interesting because it helps us understand different ways of learning a new language, we also explains how we can learn to speak in a correct way, it isn´t easy but we can do it.
ResponderEliminarI liked it
The text is really interesting because I think that listening comprehension is one of the skills that are most difficult for both teachers and students, it's really hard because we know not listen and even worse we have a good speaking.
ResponderEliminarAs a future teacher I believe that I have to build this understanding in what way? listening is the answer, making practicing listening exercises in the classroom, all these activities will help us improve the learning of English.
By Edna Eli Sánchez S.
hello teacher just came by to mention that so far I have liked the activities in the classroom particularly the description of the movie.I say goodbye for now see you soon
ResponderEliminarhi teacher... I can´t find the chapter 2 in the blog, only this :( well, I hope soon publish the text.
ResponderEliminarbye
I AM MARIBEL DE LA O
yeah!! Miss... in fact this is the only one that is published here.. so please give us information about chapter 2 va q va! :D
ResponderEliminarI'm Stephania Nataly
Tobit Avilez.
ResponderEliminarFinally I found the correct link.
In my opinion, listening is an skill which is developed through time, it is necessary to practice a lot as well as the rest of the skills I mean, speaking, writing and reading. Listening by itself it´s an ability human kind use not only for comprehension, it is used for identify the eviroment surrounded, depending on this, the message received is decoded.
Listening is an important and useful tool for human which needs to be developed perfectly in order to understand the correctly message. In addition listening can be diffucult depending on the ages of the people who is learning to listening.
The listening difficulty is variable, the more age you have, the more easy it can be, but in the other hand, it can be easier to learn when you are in contact with a certain fareign language since you are a baby child than when you are old and want to learn it. Despite of this, listening is really important for communicate with others.
Regarding to the classroom, we as future teachers we must to know a lot of strategies which help us to make the students learn to develop this important skill. One stragy could be the use of interesting, current songs or well known movies in English, movies which have been saw for the students in Spanish adn they know the scrips and can be ralated, know, in English.
In conclution, teachers must to know how to use the authentic materials for develiping listening skill in the students no matter the ages or if they are natives or not or any other kind of
circumstances ralated to the foreign language.
HI teacher I m Argelis Michel,I wrote here but today i check that my comentary didn't save, well I think that the previous text is very interesting and is a good helping to me as teacher because i can learn about that I can use strategies with my pupils, the information about listening is thrue,because is dificult learn or improve the listening comprenhesion.
ResponderEliminarHello teacher, you know? I liked the strategies used in class, but I do not understand everything and not that they are bad classes, maybe my English is not let me fully understand, but anyway I do not think I care if you do not take. EDNA ELI
ResponderEliminaryuo must have a vocabulary suitable for students according to their degree of these activities and also explains the short and precise instructions.as this will generate a pleasant working environment ans strees for students.
ResponderEliminarSo see you soon teacher guille
karen rodriguez
teaching a second language in the ability to
ResponderEliminarbe carried out escuhar very pasiencia as
sometimes students can not understand
what they say and they only generate in a
stressful situation and distaste for
lengua.se must have ulcon a range of
vocabulary to express what we say in
order to make the students learn to
understand what people will say in a
conversation.