Theory of listening and responding
PROCEEDINGS OF ELT UPGRADES 2019: A FOCUS ON METHODOLOGY – ISBN: 978-604-67-1450-7 Page | 268 AN OVERVIEW OF LISTENING SKILL THEORIES Tong Thi Hue Ho Chi Minh City University of Food Industry Email: ABSTRACT Listening plays an important role in the success of English language learning. The ability to listen well and effectively contributes to the success of the learners and teachers. To follow these steps in teaching listening is not easy for some English teachers. The results of many previous researches about the difficulties in teaching this listening skill has been showed that most teachers and students had negative attitudes towards listening to English. Taking advantages of teachers‟ attitudes and desires for teaching this skill, the researcher would like to review all steps in teaching this one with the hope of contributing, helping teachers in applying these steps, theories and having an insight about how to teach it more effectively. Doing this, some suggestions are also given in this paper. The researcher hopes to enhance the effectiveness of teaching listening and helps motivate students in studying English as well Keywords: listening skill, definitions, process, features, roles of teachers. 1 INTRODUCTION There have been other researchers who studied about teaching listening skill all over the world and in Vietnam. Listening plays an important role in communication as it is said that, of the total time spent on communicating, listening takes up 40-50%; speaking, 25-30%; reading, 11-16%; and writing, about 9% (Mendelsohn, 1994). Although the teaching of listening comprehension has long been ―somewhat neglected and poorly taught aspect of English in many EFL programs (Mendelsohn, 1994, p. 9), listening is now regarded as much more important in both EFL classrooms and SLA research. Listening involves an active process of deciphering and constructing meaning from both verbal and non-verbal messages (Nunan, 1998). Thus, the label of passive skill applied to listening is a misnomer. This misunderstanding may stem from the fact that superficially learners seem to only sit in a language lab quietly, listen to pre-recorded dialogues, and write the answers to some questions related to the oral stimulus so that listening teaching has attracted considerable attention. Unfortunately, the teaching of listening skills is still neglected in the English language teaching process. Listening levels of learners are different from each other, because listening is affected by crucial factors. The most important factors that should be emphasized are: the significance of listening, the study of listening teaching theory and use of the most advanced listening teaching methods. It is now widely accepted that students„ listening ability must be at the core of teaching practice, and it is the area in which teachers need to concentrate their own efforts to improve their teaching. This is a significant challenge for English teachers; however, it is crucial in the development of English language communicative competence. Awareness of teaching and learning styles of a listening skill may greatly contribute to the success of language learning. The researchers attempt to discuss the definition of listening, importance of
PROCEEDINGS OF ELT UPGRADES 2019: A FOCUS ON METHODOLOGY - ISBN:978-604-67-1450-7 Page | 269 listening. Then, she reviews the process of listening comprehension, strategies of listening comprehension, analysis of listening comprehension problems. Then, teaching methods for listening comprehension and teaching listening activities will be discussed. Finally, general principles in teaching listening comprehension are discussed. Findings of this study will be beneficial to EFL learners to improve their English language listening comprehension ability. 2 LITERATURE REVIEW Listening comprehension has been defined by various researchers, in which Gary Buck gave a definition in very clear words. According to Gary Buck (2001, p.31), “listening comprehension is an active process of constructing meaning and this is done by applying knowledge to the incoming sound” in which “number of different types of knowledge are involved: both linguistic and non – linguistic knowledge”. He supposed that “comprehension is affected by a wide range of variables, and that potentially any characteristic of the speaker, the situation or the listener can affect the comprehension of the message”. (Gary Buck, 2001, p.31). There do exist controversies on the nature of listening comprehension. According to Anderson and Lynch (1988), there are two influential views: traditional view and alternative view. Traditional view regarded the listener as a tape-recorder and the listener took in and stored aural messages in much the same way as a tape-recorder. Anderson and Lynch criticized this view as inappropriate and inadequate. This notion is not a tenable one. Alternative view considered the listener as an active model builder. This kind of listener could combine the new information with his previous knowledge and experience to reach full comprehension of what had been heard. Anderson and Lynch agreed with this view. It emphasized the active interpretation and integration of incoming information with prior knowledge and experience. Clark and Clark (1977, pp. 43-44) gave both a narrow and broad definition of listening comprehension “Comprehension has two common senses. In its narrow sense it denotes the mental processes by which listeners take in the sounds uttered by a speaker and use them to construct an interpretation of what they think the speaker intended to convey.... Comprehension in its broader sense, however, rarely ends here, for listeners normally put the interpretations they have built to work”. Listening comprehension process consists of three steps: receiving, attending and understanding in sequence. The understanding step may be followed by responding and remembering as listeners may respond immediately or remember the message to respond at a later time. (Wolvin and Coakly, 1985). Listening is not a single skill. It includes many different components and is a complex process involving an interaction between listeners, speakers and spoken texts. Michael Rost (1991) divided listening into two elements: the component skills and what a listener does. What a listener does is a list of activities that listeners take to understand messages. The listeners must take decisions of things such as the kind of situation, important words or units of meaning… Listening comprehension is of great importance in foreign language learning. “Listening is vital in the language classroom because it provides input for the learners. Without understanding input at the right level, any learner simply can‟t begin” (Rost, 1991, p.141). In order to take part in communication activities, it is clear that ones must have the ability to absorb the information from speakers through listening. Since listening is important to understand spoken message, the teaching of listening cannot be neglected from the teaching of English.
PROCEEDINGS OF ELT UPGRADES 2019: A FOCUS ON METHODOLOGY – ISBN: 978-604-67-1450-7 Page | 270 3 LISTENING PROCESSES Basing on how the listeners process the input, researchers have classified listening process into two types: bottom up process and top down process. Bottom – up processing Bottom – up process is the text based process. The listeners try to make sense of what they hear by focusing on the different parts: the vocabulary, the grammar or functional phrases, sounds… (David Nunan, 1999, p.6). Bottom – up “is a process of decoding the sounds that one hears in a linear fashion, from the smallest meaningful units (or phonemes) to complete texts. In other words, the listeners make use of “his knowledge of words, syntax, and grammar to work on form”. (Rubin, 1994, p.20) Top – down processing Top down process is the process in which listeners employ background knowledge or textual schema to make sense of what they hear. The knowledge may be the general knowledge based on life experience and previous learning, or the knowledge of language and content used in a particular situation. In fact, the two processes can not be separated during listening comprehension. In other words, listening comprehension is not either top-down or bottom-up processing, but an interactive process during which listeners use both prior knowledge and linguistic knowledge in understanding. Anderson and Lynch (1988, p.13) illustrated the relationship between top down and bottom up processing in comprehension in the below figure Figure 1: Information sources in comprehension (Anderson and Lynch, 1988, p.13) Background knowledge schematic knowledge →→→ C - factual ↑ ↓ - social M Procedure knowledge - how language is used in discourse R ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ ↑----------- ↓----------- E Knowledge of situation H - physical setting, participants, etc context →→→ E Knowledge of co – text ↑ ↓ N - what has been/ will be said (written) S ------------------------------------------------------------------------------↑------------↓------------ I Knowledge of the language system O - semantic ↑ ↓ N - syntactic - phonological Intensive listening and extensive listening
PROCEEDINGS OF ELT UPGRADES 2019: A FOCUS ON METHODOLOGY - ISBN:978-604-67-1450-7 Page | 271 Rixon (1986) had a different way of classifying listening. He divided listening into two types: intensive and extensive listening. Intensive listening is listening for detailed information, for example: listening to the announcement or listening to the weather forecast. Intensive listening requires listeners to understand the meaning of each discourse and, ultimately, to understand every sentence and word. Generally, intensive listening requires listeners to listen to a text several times, or divide the text into paragraphs and sentences to understand each one. The goal is for students to understand every sentence. Extensive listening, on the other hand, is listening to natural language for general ideas, not for particular details. Extensive listening does not require students to understand every sentence, and every word, instead, students are encouraged to grasp the general meaning of the passage The listening passage can be long (listening to stories) or short (listening to jokes, poems). The key point of listening is to understand the content. The purpose of intensive listening is to build basic listening skills, while extensive listening is to strengthen and enlarge effectiveness of intensive listening in order to improve overall listening ability. 4 THE FEATURES OF SPOKEN ENGLISH In the Results section, summarize the collected data and the analysis performed on those data relevant to It can be recognized that spoken English has different features from written English. Being taught to recognize and make use of the features of spoken English in learning listening is very useful for learners to improve their listening ability. According to Mary Underwood (1989), the differences happen on sound, stress and intonation, the organization of speech, syntax and vocabulary, pauses and fillers, and formal and informal language. The sounds In English, there are sounds which are unknown or unusual for foreign learners, as a result they may fail to catch such sounds or to distinguish from similar sounds. In other cases, listeners may find that sounds are distorted, elided or lost altogether. It is also a frequent fact that listeners with only little listening experience fail to connect the sounds they hear with words they have seen and recognized in written form, which makes them confused and discouraged when listening. It will be of much help for the students to learn this knowledge in continuous speech so that they can associate what they hear with the language they already know in written form (Mary Underwood, 1989, p. 9). The stress and intonation Stress is widely used in spoken English, which aims to carry the main information speakers wish to convey and emphasize. Obviously, words in spoken continuous speech are often not given the same stress as they receive when they are said in isolation. Students need to be explained and shown stressed words as well as unstressed words which helps them avoid the feeling that comprehension is impossible as they fail to hear all words clearly. (Mary Underwood, 1989, p. 10) The organization of speech Speaking is a creative process, in which speakers are almost in the position of formulating what they are saying. Therefore, there is no certain way of knowing how a speaker‟s speech will be organized. However, there are some “markers” which listeners can use to convey what speakers are saying. For example, to show agreement, speakers often use phrases like: “Yes, it is”, “Mm” … or to show disagreement, speakers may use “Yes, but…” or “Well, er…” In addition, certain
PROCEEDINGS OF ELT UPGRADES 2019: A FOCUS ON METHODOLOGY – ISBN: 978-604-67-1450-7 Page | 272 expressions are very useful for conveying information or keeping up with spoken texts. For instance, when there are events or examples in a time sequence, time words such as: “first, second, third, next, last…” are usually used. In other case, when speakers make comparisons or contrasts, they often use “but, however, in contrast…” When students develop the skill of recognizing those “markers”, they will find it easier to follow “the flow of information”. (Mary Underwood, 1989, p. 11) The syntax and vocabulary of speech In Teaching the Spoken Language, Brown and Yule identify a number of differences between spoken discourse and written discourse (as cited in Teaching Listening, Mary Underwood, 1989, p. 12) Most speakers of English produce spoken language which is simpler than written language in terms of syntax. Instead of using subordinate clauses as in written form, speakers tend to use separate sentences. When subordinate clauses are used, they are generally linked by simple conjunctions such as: “and, but, then” more than relative words. Speakers often use incomplete sentences The vocabulary of spoken discourse is usually “much less specific” than that in written discourse. For instance, speakers usually use “it / somebody/ they/ you” to refer to people in general, which can be understood by relating them to the immediate context in which they are used. Interactive expressions in spoken language like: “Well / Oh, Uhuh” Information is “packed very much densely” in spoken language than in written discourse. It can be very helpful for students to know such characteristics of spoken language. Being aware of such information, they can apply them into their listening to get better result. (Mary Underwood, 1989, p. 12). Pauses and fillers Pauses occur in speech to give listeners time to think about what has been just said and to relate it to what has gone before. Long gaps in speech are often filled with sounds/ expressions such as “Er…/and er….” to avoid silences. Being explained these facts helps students recognize them and know that they are not part of the essential message. (Mary Underwood, 1989, p. 13). Formal and informal language There is often a distinction between the language spoken in “formal” and “informal” situations. Many language learners have limited experience of English language in informal situation as in their lessons; they tend to use formal language. Consequently, they may have difficulties in understanding informal spoken discourse. (Mary Underwood, 1989, p. 14). 5 PROCEDURE OF LISTENING LESSONS Along with teaching and explaining the features of spoken language to the learners, designing listening lessons contributes greatly to the success of teaching listening. In order to help learners get most from a listening lesson, a lesson plan of listening is usually divided into three stages: things learners do before listening, things learners during listening, things learners after listening. In other words, procedure of a listening lesson consists of three stages: pre – listening, while – listening and post listening.
PROCEEDINGS OF ELT UPGRADES 2019: A FOCUS ON METHODOLOGY - ISBN:978-604-67-1450-7 Page | 273 Pre – listening stage Pre – listening stage is the stage that prepares students for listening tasks. This stage asks students to get to think about the topic they are going to listen. In other words, this stage helps students “focus their minds on the topics” by narrowing down the things that the students expect to hear and activating relevant knowledge and already known language (Mary Underwood, 1989, p.31). When planning lessons, time must be allocated for pre – listening activities and the activities should not be rushed Pre – listening work can be done in a variety ways. Some of the activities are clearly preparation for listening, while the others might be the setting – up of the while – listening activity. However, all different activities in pre listening stage provide students‟ opportunities to gain some knowledge that will help them to follow the listening text. In addition, in this pre – listening stage, students are likely to use the words which they will shortly hear in the text. This will assist them when they come to match what they hear with their store of knowledge. Moreover, students can increase the sense of realism thanks to being provided information about when, where, by whom and to whom the words were spoken. And obviously, the fact that all the students understand what they have to do before you start to play the listening text is of much importance to the students‟ success in listening. Pre – listening work can consist of a whole range of activities, including: – The teacher giving background – The students reading something relevant – The students looking at pictures – Discussion of the topic/ situation – A question and answer session – Written exercise – Following the instructions for the while – listening activity – Consideration of how the while – listening activity will be done (Mary Underwood, 1989, p. 31) While – listening stage While – listening stage is the stage in which students are asked to do tasks during the time that they are listening to the texts. While- listening stage helps students listen better, more accurately through a list of designed comprehension tasks. As Rixon (1986) pointed out that the purposes of while listening stage is to challenge and guide students to handle the information and the message from the listening text. However, to reach that goal, while – listening activities should be interesting, so that students feel they want to listen and carry out the activities. Moreover, they should be things which most people can do. They must vary at different levels and in different cases. Some while – listening activities are successful with groups of varying levels of ability. Exercises which require students to check, tick, draw, circle… make good while listening activities and should not be rejected because of their simple structure. In addition, the topics and the content of the listening texts plus the students‟ interest decide the success of while – listening activities. Therefore, choosing appropriate materials for while – listening stage is of great importance to the improvement of learners.
PROCEEDINGS OF ELT UPGRADES 2019: A FOCUS ON METHODOLOGY – ISBN: 978-604-67-1450-7 Page | 274 Mary Underwood (1989, pp 49 -50) recommended various while – listening activities: – Marking / checking items in pictures – Multiple – choice questions – Putting pictures in order – Text - completion – True / false exercise – Making models/ arranging items in patterns – Completing grids Post – listening stage Post – listening stage is the stage in which all the work related to a particular listening text are done after listening is completed. Some post listening activities are extensions of the work done at the pre – listening and while – listening stage and some relate only loosely to the listening itself (Mary Underwood, 1989, p. 74). Some common forms of post – listening activities are the answering of multiple choice questions or open questions based on the spoken text. Post – listening activities aim at checking whether the students have understood what they need to understand and whether they have completed whatever while – listening task has been set successfully. There is a number of ways to reach this purpose: by the teacher giving the answers orally, by pairs checking each other‟s answers, by the teacher showing the answers on the blackboard, by group discussion …Another purpose of post – listening stage is to reflect on why some students have failed to understand or missed part of the message. At this stage, discussions are often employed, and then the teachers have opportunities to draw attention to specific parts of the listening text and focus on the forms, functions, lexis, stress and intonation which have caused problems for the listeners. This stage also aims at expanding the topics and the language of the listening texts. This can help students gain some certain knowledge on the topics they have listened to, which widen their background and languages abilities for further. Here is the list of post listening activities offered by Mary Underwood (1989, pp. 82-83) Role – play Summarizing Establishing the mood/ attitude/ behavior of the speaker Written work Form/ chart completion Matching with a reading text 6 ROLES OF TEACHERS IN LISTENING LESSONS English listening is very helpful to all students to deepen or to improve their language skill. To have effective listening lessons, the role of teachers is very crucial. Ma ry Underwood (1989, pp. 21- 22) supposed that in listening classes, a teacher needs to be imaginative and creative in developing their teaching methods to develop good atmosphere and make English lessons more exiting. In this way, the listening teacher has to be able to create interesting materials for the students in the
PROCEEDINGS OF ELT UPGRADES 2019: A FOCUS ON METHODOLOGY - ISBN:978-604-67-1450-7 Page | 275 process of teaching and they have to know how to apply them. The influence of the materials and the methods of the English teacher in teaching listening is really vital, because students will be more interested in their study. The competence of the teacher in teaching listening will also influence the success of students. Teacher should have a set of exercises, tasks or other activities for the students in their classes. It is really beneficial and positive experience to try various classroom activities because successful materials of the subject matter depend on the use of teaching method. An overview of common difficulties in teaching listening comprehension As mentioned above, to master a language, it is necessary for learners to develop all aspects of a language equally and it is necessary for teachers to teach all aspects effectively. However, the teaching of listening is not really as effective and successful as the teaching of other parts. In her research in Da Nang University, Ton Nu Xuan Huong (2007) found out that there are three main factors leading to this fact. Firstly, the teaching of listening can be a hard work due to learner element. Learners with their limitations in terms of language ability and listening experience may make the teaching of listening less successful. Secondly, lacking of teaching facilities and equipment, to some extent, prevents the teaching of listening from reaching the best results. Thirdly, and most importantly, it is the inefficiency in teaching methodology when teachers conduct their lessons should be responsible. The effectiveness of listening lessons depends greatly on the ways teachers plan their teaching in class. This thesis focused on investigating the teachers‟ methodology and activities in listening classes to find out the problems that the teachers have to face when teaching listening comprehension. 7 SUGGESTIONS 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. 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
PROCEEDINGS OF ELT UPGRADES 2019: A FOCUS ON METHODOLOGY – ISBN: 978-604-67-1450-7 Page | 276 sure they can hear and understand everything, increasing their interest and confidence in further listening. 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 8 CONCLUSIVE REMARKS In this overview, the relevant literature which is needed to form the theoretical framework for the present study is presented. First of all, prominent definitions of listening, listening skill and listening strategies were given according to some leading researchers. Then the nature of listening comprehension and listening process were introduced. This paper also mentioned about procedures of listening lessons with three very necessary stages: pre, while, post listening stage. In addition, roles of teachers in listening lessons were discussed as they are vital factors to the success of the lessons. Next, an overview of common difficulties that teachers meet in teaching listening was presented and taken into consideration. Lastly, if the methods are achieved, all students will be taught in a manner they prefer, which leads students to comfortable, eager, willing and cooperative attitudes to learn and then successful instructors with “nice” teaching methods will be responded with good feedbacks from students REFERENCE [1] Anderson, & Lynch, T. (1988). Listening. New York: Oxford University Press. [2] Clark and Clark. (1977), listening comprehension, and the input hypothesis. TESOL Quarterly, 19(4):43- 44. [3] David Nunan (1998). Listening Strategies in Second Language Acquisition. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press [4] Gary Buck, (2001). What Practitioners says about Listening: Research Implications for the Classroom. Foreign Language Annals, 17: p31. [5] Michael Rost, (1991). Teaching and Researching Listening. London, UK: Longman. [6] Mendelsohn (1999), “The Power of Listening Ability: An Overlooked Dimension in Language Acquisition‟, The Modern Language Journal, p9 [7] Mary Underwood (1989), “Research Update on L2 Listening” [8] Rixon (1986). Dimensions of difficulty in listening comprehension. In D. Mendelsohn [9] Rubin (1994.) A guide for the teaching of second language listening. (pp. 20). San Diego, CA: Dominie Press. [10] Ton Nu Xuan Huong, (2007. Main factors in listening skill, Da Nang University [11] Wolvin and Coakly. (1985). An Investigation of English Listening Strategies Used by Continuous Education Program Students. |