TEACHING LISTENING SKILLS

THE NATURE OF LISTENING COMPREHENSION

Listening comprehension is not as simple as it may appear in the surface. It is a quite complex process, in which interact many different factors that may influence in the listener in order to construct the meaning of the information received. The main factors are the acoustic input; that is the external input, the types of linguistic knowledge that are linguistic and non linguistic knowledge, the context in which the text takes place and the general world knowledge.

There are many different reasons why this process could get difficult; first of all the listener must have a linguistic knowledge of what he is listening. It includes knowledge about the phonology system of the language, lexis, syntax, semantic and discourse structure. This kind of information may be useful, however it is not enough. One reason is that, many times the speaker and the listener have different concepts of life. Normally, the speaker does not say everything explicitly, because it is supposed that the listener will infer what he intends to say, although it does not happen this way.

Summarizing this process; first, the listener receive the information as an acoustic input; then, it is interpreted according to the situation to what the listener knows about the topic; finally, he constructs his own meaning. This is called top-down process, because it is interactive. Often, it is not necessary to understand first, the single words to later understand ideas. Sometimes we did not even listen to some words and we understand the message, because we expect something to be heard.

I suggest that this process could be bottom up in some circumstances or at least in certain degree. One example is with babies or little children. They do not have much knowledge of the world, they take the literal meaning of any message, first they need to understand words, then phrases to later understand a wider discourse. They normally do not understand irony or sarcasm.

It is important to include both types of knowledge mentioned above in the everyday teaching. Teaching the phonemes, vocabulary, sentence patterns and discourse features is quite helpful for students to construct a linguistic platform to use it in a communicative context. On the other hand, it is also useful to teach culture to understand different kinds of contexts. Including culture to lesson plans may be interesting and useful for learners.

Learning about characteristics of spoken texts might help learners to understand some difficulties they will face when engaging in a spoken situation; therefore to create strategies to overcome such obstacles.

It is my experience that learners take advantage when they are taught characteristics of pronunciation, such as phonological modification. I normally teach this aspect at the beginning of a course. If learners do not know how pronunciation is modify in speech, they tend to fail in understanding; even though, they may understand the single words separated the most common problem is when some sounds are eliminated as a result of word combination.

Stress and intonation may be useful to understand the real meaning of the utterance. These characteristics are the most taught in commercial books to teach English as a second language for the same reason. Giving a different intonation or stress to something said change the meaning of it. I consider that speech rate could be taught or practice at higher levels due to the difficulty to process automatically at the beginning levels.

The complex listening process has been described as a grouping of sub-skills that help to understand it better. Valette (1977:20) influenced by Bloom’s (1956) suggested a taxonomy of cognitive skills with five levels. Aitken (1978) created a taxonomy of sub skills that refers to communicative skills. On the other hand, Richards (1983) states that it depend of the purpose of listening to know which are the sub skills required and suggests some taxonomies for different listening purposes, such as listening for social communication, for information, for academic purposes and for pleasure. Personally, I consider this taxonomy one of the most complete since it includes sub skills for a wide listening purposes.

Since the purpose of learning a second language is to use it in communication, it is important to take into consideration in which situations learners will be, that will require their language competence. There will be a good quantity of listening situations that will demand understanding in order to respond. It is in real life where learners will be proved with their competence. That is why it is significant that teachers use in their lesson plans real life and authentic listening activities.

In some courses, students are exposed mainly to prefabricated listening recordings, simple and with limited vocabulary and expressions on it. Learners get use to these kinds of material and when engaging in an authentic situation, they struggle comprehending the message. One example is when teachers provide some graded recordings in certain topics that maybe are not of the interest of the learner using quite formal language, then this learner travel to visit his cousins in the United States and when trying to engage in informal conversation, he does not understand the features of it, for example slang and redundancy.

Teachers are able to design their own listening materials; we can record a real conversation and use it in class, or even better to see the conversation in real life maybe inviting some people to the class to interact with learners. Another option is to use authentic recordings, such as documentaries, movies, phone calls and more to design the lessons.

To get competence in listening comprehension is not easy; although, it is not impossible. With the help of the correct techniques and materials to learn the main features of spoken language and put it into practice learners can achieve it. Classes if well developed can be useful to master this competency if they are focused on the different listening purposes and pay special attention to the characteristics that makes listening unique.

BIBLIOGRAPHY:

· BUCK, G. (2001) Assessing Listening. UK: CUP

· BUCK, G. (2001) Assessing Listening. UK: CUP pgs.31-60.

· UR, P. (1984). pgs. 2-10.