PSYCHOLINGUISTIC
ABOUT
ISSUE IN LISTENING
CHAPTER
ISSUE IN LISTENING
A.
Listening
Problems And Solutions
In teaching listening comprehension we must be careful not to go to
extremes, either by being concerned too exclusively with theories without
thinking about their application to teaching, or by obstinately following
frozen routines-opening the textbook and explaining new words, playing the tape
recorder, and asking/answering questions. It is essential for a teacher to have
an overall understanding of what listening is, why it is difficult for foreign-language
learners, and what some solutions may be. The vital question is how to bridge
the gap between an analysis of listening and actual classroom teaching.
1. What is Listening
Listening is the ability to
identify and understand what others are saying. This involves understanding a
speaker’s accent or pronunciation, his grammar and his vocabulary, and grasping
his meaning (Howatt and Dakin 1974). An able listener is capable of doing these
four things simultaneously. Willis (1981:134) lists a series of micro-skills of
listening, which she calls enabling skills. They are:
·
predicting what people are going to talk about
·
guessing
at unknown words or phrases without panicking
·
using one’s own knowledge of the subject to help
one understand
·
identifying relevant points; rejecting
irrelevant information
·
retaining
relevant points (note-taking, summarizing)
·
recognizing
discourse markers, e.g Well; Oh, another thing is; Now, finally; etc
·
recognizing cohesive devices, e.g. such as and
which, including link words, pronouns, references, etc.
·
understanding different intonation patterns and
uses of stress, etc. which give clues to meaning and social setting
·
understanding
inferred information, e.g. speakers’ attitude or intentions
2. What are some Issue in listening
The evidence
that shows why listening is difficult comes mainly from four sources: the
message to be listened to, the speaker, the listener, and the physical setting.
Many
learners find it more difficult to listen to a taped message than to read the
same message on a piece of paper, since the listening passage comes into the
ear in the twinkling of an eye, whereas reading material can be read as long as
the reader likes. The listening material may deal with almost any area of life.
It might include street gossip, proverbs, new products, and situations
unfamiliar to the student. Also, in a spontaneous conversation speakers
frequently change topics.
The
content is usually not well organized. In many cases listeners cannot predict
what speakers are going to say, whether it is a news report on the radio, an
interviewer’s questions, an everyday conversation, etc. Messages on the radio
or recorded on tape cannot be listened to at a slower speed. Even in
conversation it is impossible to ask the speaker to repeat something as many
times as the interlocutor might like.
Linguistic Features. Liaison (the
linking of words in speech when the second word begins with a vowel, e.g, an orange /@nOrIndZ/) and elision (leaving out
a sound or sounds, e.g suppose may be pronounced
/sp@uz/ in rapid speech) are common phenomena that make it difficult for
students to distinguish or recognize individual words in the stream of speech.
They are used to seeing words written as discrete entities in their textbooks.
If
listening materials are made up of everyday conversation, they may contain a
lot of colloquial words and expressions, such as stuff for material, guy for
man, etc., as well as slang. Students who have been exposed mainly to formal or
bookish English may not be familiar with these expressions. In spontaneous
conversations people sometimes use ungrammatical sentences because of
nervousness or hesitation. They may omit elements of sentences or add something
redundant. This may make it difficult for the listener to understand the
meaning.
a.
The Speaker
in
ordinary conversation or even in much extempore speech-making or lecturing we
actually say a good deal more than would appear to be necessary in order to
convey our message. Redundant utterances may take the form of repetitions,
false starts, re-phrasings, self-corrections, elaborations, tautologies, and
apparently meaningless additions such as I mean or you know.” This redundancy
is a natural feature of speech and may be either a help or a hindrance,
depending on the students’ level. It may make it more difficult for beginners
to understand what the speaker is saying; on the other hand, it may give
advanced students more time to “tune in” to the speaker’s voice and speech
style. Learners tend to be used to their teacher’s accent or to the standard
variety of British or American English. They find it hard to understand
speakers with other accents.
Spoken prose, as
in news broadcasting and reading aloud written texts, is characterized by an
even pace, volume, pitch, and intonation. Natural dialogues, on the other hand,
are full of hesitations, pauses, and uneven intonation. Students used to the
former kinds of listening material may sometimes find the latter difficult to
understand.
b.
The Listener
Foreign-language
students are not familiar enough with clichés and collocations in English to
predict a missing word or phrase. They cannot, for example, be expected to know
that rosy often collocates with cheeks nor to predict the last word will be
something like rage when they hear the phrase he was in a towering. . . . This
is a major problem for students. Lack of sociocultural, factual, and contextual
knowledge of the target language can present an obstacle to comprehension
because language is used to express its culture (Anderson and Lynch 1988).
Foreign-language
learners usually devote more time to reading than to listening, and so lack
exposure to different kinds of listening materials. Even our college students
majoring in English have no more than four hours’ regular training per week.
Both psychological and physical factors may have a negative effect on
perception and interpretation of listening material. It is tiring for students
to concentrate on interpreting unfamiliar sounds, words, and sentences for long
periods.
c.
Physical
Setting
Noise, including both background noises on the
recording and environmental noises, can take the listener’s mind off the
content of the listening passage. Listening material on tape or radio lacks
visual and aural environmental clues. Not seeing the speaker’s body language
and facial expressions makes it more difficult for the listener to understand
the speaker’s meaning. Unclear sounds resulting from poor-quality equipment can
interfere with the listener’s comprehension.
B.
Some Solutions
What can
teachers do to help students master the difficulties?
Not
all the problems described above can be overcome. Certain features of the
message and the speaker, for instance, are inevitable. But this does not mean
that the teacher can do nothing about them. S/he can at least provide the
students with suitable listening materials, background and linguistic
knowledge, enabling skills, pleasant classroom conditions, and useful exercises
to help them discover effective listening strategies. Here are a few helpful
ideas:
1. The Message
a. Grade
listening materials according to the students’ level, and provide authentic
materials rather than idealized, filtered samples. It is true that natural
speech is hard to grade and it is difficult for students to identify the
different voices and cope with frequent overlaps. Nevertheless, the materials
should progress step by step from semi-authenticity that displays most of the
linguistic features of natural speech to total authenticity, because the final
aim is to understand natural speech in real life.
b. Design
task-oriented exercises to engage the students’ interest and help them learn
listening skills subconsciously. As Ur (1984:25) has said, “Listening exercises
are most effective if they are constructed round a task. That is to say, the
students are required to do something in response to what they hear that will
demonstrate their understanding.” She has suggested some such tasks: expressing
agreement or disagreement, taking notes, marking a picture or diagram according
to instructions, and answering questions. Compared with traditional
multiple-choice questions, task- based exercises have an obvious advantage:
they not only test the students’ listening comprehension but also encourage
them to use different kinds of listening skills and strategies to reach their
destination in an active way.
c. Provide
students with different kinds of input, such as lectures, radio news, films, TV
plays, announcements, everyday conversation, interviews, storytelling, English
songs, and so on.
Brown
and Yule (1983) categorize spoken texts into three broad types: static,
dynamic, and abstract. Texts that describe objects or give instructions are
static texts; those that tell a story or recount an incident are dynamic texts;
those that focus on someone’s ideas and beliefs rather than on concrete objects
are abstract texts. Brown and Yule suggest that the three types of input should
be provided according to the difficulties they present and the students’ level.
They draw a figure, in which difficulty increases from left to right, and,
within any one type of input, complexity increases from top to bottom.
d. Try
to find visual aids or draw pictures and diagrams associated with the listening
topics to help students guess or imagine actively.
2.
The Speaker
a.
Give practice in liaisons and elisions in order to help
students get used to the acoustic forms of rapid natural speech. It is useful
to find rapidly uttered colloquial collocations and ask students to imitate
native speakers’ pronunciation.
b.
Make students aware of different native-speaker
accents. Of course, strong regional accents are not suitable for training in
listening, but in spontaneous conversation native speakers do have certain
accents. Moreover, the American accent is quite different from the British and
Australian. Therefore, it is necessary to let students deal with different
accents, especially in extensive listening.
c.
Select short, simple listening texts with little
redundancy for lower-level students and complicated authentic materials with
more redundancy for advanced learners. It has been reported that
elementary-level students are not capable of interpreting extra information in
the redundant messages, whereas advanced listeners may benefit from messages
being expanded, paraphrased, etc. (Chaudron 1983).
3. The Listener
a.
Provide background knowledge and linguistic knowledge,
such as complex sentence structures and colloquial words and expressions, as
needed.
b.
Give, and try to get, as much feedback as possible.
Throughout the course the teacher should bridge the gap between input and
students’ response and between the teacher’s feedback and students’ reaction in
order to keep activities purposeful. It is important for the listening-class
teacher to give students immediate feedback on their performance. This not only
promotes error correction but also provides encouragement. It can help students
develop confidence in their ability to deal with listening problems. Student
feedback can help the teacher judge where the class is going and how it should
be guided.
c.
Help students develop the skills of listening with
anticipation, listening for specific information, listening for gist,
interpretation and inference, listening for intended meaning, listening for
attitude, etc., by providing varied tasks and exercises at different levels
with different focuses.
C.
Typology of Activities for a Listening.
I suggest a variety of exercises, tasks, and
activities appropriate to different stages of a listening lesson
(pre-listening, while-listening, and post-listening). Good classroom activities
can themselves be effective solutions to listening problems.
The
list covers a wide range of listening activities from simple to more
sophisticated. Some teachers, accustomed to following exactly the exercises and
tasks provided in the textbook without thinking about whether they are suitable
for their students or not, might look on these activities as extra work and a
burden. I would like to point out that it is a pleasure and a positive experience
to try various exercises, tasks, and classroom activities, for successful
lessons depend on the teacher’s knowing and using a variety of teaching
methods. Teachers should have at their fingertips a set of exercises, tasks,
and activities that they can use with their classes whenever they may be
needed.
Conclusion:
Some
teachers think that listening is the easiest skill to teach, whereas most
students think it is the most difficult to improve. This contradiction tells us
that there are some things about teaching listening that need to be explored.
Perhaps those who say it is “the easiest to teach” mean that it does not
require much painstaking lesson preparation and all they need to do is play the
tapes and test the students’ comprehension. But is there nothing more to
teaching listening than testing? We must find out all we can about how
listening can be improved and what activities are useful to this end and then
use this knowledge and these activities in our own classrooms.
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