skkn EXPERIENCE INITIATIVE DEVELOPING LISTENING SKILLS

WHAT IF STUDENTS DO NOT UNDERSTAND THE LISTENING TAPE?. In class, we are usually concerned with the second kind of listening : we expect the students to listen closely and remember after

EDUCATION AND TRAINING DEPARTEMENT OF DONG NAI PROVINCE

PHUOC THIEN HIGH SCHOOL CODE: ………

EXPERIENCE INITIATIVE

DEVELOPING LISTENING SKILLS

Written by: ĐOÀN THỊ HỒNG HOA

Research area:

Education management:……… 

English teaching method: English  Othe fields:……….……… 

Enclosed with:

Model  software  Film and picture  other related things

SCHOOL YEAR: 2011-2012

I PERSONAL INFORMATION

1 Họ Full name: Đoàn Thị Hồng Hoa

2 Date of birth: 20th, June 1977

3 Male / female: female

4 Address: An Phuoc village, Long Thanh district, Dong Nai province

5 Phone number: 0919503336

6 Fax: Email:

7 Career: English Teacher

8 Work at: Phuoc Thien High School

II EDUCATION

- University: B.A in English

- Year graduated: 1999

- Trained speciality: English

III EXPERIENCE

- Experienced professional field:

- Year of Teaching : 13

- Recently written theme:

I INTRODUCTION

II CONTENTS

A.THEORETICAL BACKGROUND

1 What is listening?

2 Why teach listening?

3 Two ways of listening

B CONTENTS

1 WARM – UP EXERCISES

a Using Pictures

b Questions and Answers

c Brainstorm

d Describe the Picture

2 STAGES OF A LISTENING LESSON

a Pre-listening stage

b While-listening stage

c Post-listening stage

3 WHAT IF STUDENTS DO NOT UNDERSTAND THE LISTENING TAPE?

4 LISTENING PROBLEMS AND STRATEGIES TO DEAL WITH THEM III.CONCLUSION

IV REFERENCES

Phuoc Thien High school is one of the prestigious schools in Dong nai province It

has 25 classes with over 1000 students each year As common in other high schools in Vietnam, the students in this school have to take English as compulsory subject in the curriculum and study it four periods a week ( 1 period

= 45 minutes), for 37 weeks a year Most of the students in my class are not good

at listening English In discussion with them, I know that they already want to improve their listening skills However, their listening is poor because they do not have much time to practise listening Therefore, in order to promote the students’ listening skills, I would like to suggest some strategies for developing listening skills

II.CONTENTS

A.THEORETICAL BACKGROUND

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 (Goh, 2002) An able listener is capable of doing these four things simultaneously Willis (1981, p.134) lists a series of micro-skills of listening, which she calls enabling micro-skills They are:

• guessing at unknown words or phrases without panicking

• predicting what people are going to talk about

• using one’s own knowledge of the topic 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 inferred information, e.g., speakers’ attitude or intentions

• understanding different intonation patterns and uses of stress, etc., which give clues

to meaning and social setting

2 Why teach listening?

Listening is an important skill and probably the most difficult one Getting students

to listen to spoken English is to let them hear different accents and varieties apart from

their teacher and that way better prepare them for real world listening The main method of exposing them to spoken English other than their teacher’s is using taped material that exemplify a wide range of topic such broadcast news, announcement, advertisement, etc

From a theoretical perspective, teaching listening will help them acquire the language subconsciously even when the teacher does not draw their attention to special features It is agreed that exposure to the target language is a fundamental requirement for those who want to learn it The use of tape material will provide students with such exposure and they will get information not only vocabulary and structure but also pronunciation, rhythm, intonation, pitch and stress

3 Two ways of listening

In real life, there are two ways in which we often listen:

- ‘Casual’ listening: Sometimes we listen with no particular purpose in mind, and often without much concentration Examples of this kind of listening are : listening to the radio while doing some homework; chatting to a friend Usually

we do not listen very closely, unless we hear something that particularly interests us, and afterwards we may not remember much of what we hear

- ‘Focussed’ listening: At other times we listen for a particular purpose, to find out information we need to know Examples of this kind of listening are: listening to a piece of information news on the radio; listening to someone explaining how to operate a machine In these situations, we listen much more closely; but we do not listen to everything we hear with equal concentration –

we listen for the most important points or for particular information Usually,

we know beforehand what we are listening for ( the things we want to know), and this helps us to listen

In class, we are usually concerned with the second kind of listening : we expect the students to listen closely and remember afterwards what they heard But if we just ask the class to ‘listen’ and we ask questions afterwards, we are giving them a very difficult task We can make it easier by telling them beforehand what to expect and what to listen for - this will help them to focus their listening

The traditional way of teaching, such as, introducing some new difficult words, listening to the tape again and again and then giving correct answers, still prevails It is not difficult for us to see how detrimental such a listening class is to learners Such an approach to "teaching" listening is more like "testing" listening, because listeners are simply exposed to a succession of listening texts on a tape, and then are tested how

much they have understood in terms of a lot of comprehension exercises rather than being taught how to listen and how to cope with their listening problems in the class

Many students complained that they became tired of listening to the tape from beginning to the end with some mechanical exercises Without interest, motivation and variation in teaching and learning, students felt bored in listening classes As a result, the passive attitude kept students from making much progress in listening comprehension In this paper, what we want to discuss is how to make listening classes more interesting and how to develop students' listening ability

Just as Broughton says, "motivation is a basic principle of all kinds of teaching - the language student is best motivated by practice in which he senses the language is truly communicative, that it is appropriate to its context, that his teacher's skills are moving him forward to a fuller competence in the foreign language." So, how

to keep students' interest in learning must be focused Unfortunately, some English teachers often pay more attention to 'filling' the students with many mechanical exercises, ignoring the interest and motivation in class

B CONTENTS

1 WARM – UP EXERCISES

The Importance of Warm-up Exercises

In class, we must try to avoid boring or over-theoretical or mechanical subjects, using as far as possible warm-up exercises we think our students may be interested in, that seem of practical relevance, that may arouse or stimulate them Sometimes, a picture or a humorous story can do a great deal towards arousing interest among students However, during the whole listening course, most teachers actually only have

a 'while-listening' stage, neglecting the 'pre-listening or warm-up exercise step, which acts as an important role in arousing students' interest and as the preparation stage for the 'while-listening' stage

As a matter of fact, we can say that how well students had done in class depends mostly on how well they had been warmed up From this point of view, English teachers should start taking concrete measures to reconsider the methodology they can apply in their listening courses and try to improve their teaching of listening from a new approach We should use some techniques that are effective and interesting in teaching listening courses, thinking as much as possible about the needs of students concerned

a Using Pictures

I often use pictures in listening class Pictures have the advantage of being easy to prepare, easy to organize, being interesting, meaningful and authentic Pictures can bring images of reality into the unnatural world of the language classroom Pictures are useful in developing students' listening comprehension, particularly 'directed listening' They not only help to guide the student' listening, they can provide a general background and context They especially contribute to interest and motivation For example, try this "spot the similarity" activity

• Ask the students to get into pairs, give each student or pair of students a picture that the other(s) must not see

• Tell them that they have pictures that are very different from each other, and ask them to describe these pictures to each other with the aim of finding as many similarities as they can

• After several minutes, ask them to look at the two pictures and see what other similarities they can find

Sometimes, I read descriptions of faces, maps, diagrams for students to draw No matter how well or badly they had done, students were so happy to have the chance to listen, speak, and do something interesting in the listening class which they once considered a 'sleeping course'

Unit 11: National Parks ( Grade 10 )

I stick 2 pictures and ask my students to look at these pictures and discuss the questions :

1 Where is Nairobi National park ?

2.Is Everglades National Park a sub-tropical wilderness in southeastern United States ?

Then I introduce the new lesson.

b Questions and Answers

Some people might think that asking questions is a purely technical (i e grammatical) matter But in my class, it is not As a matter of fact, no matter how effective a technique is, listening comprehension should demand students' participation, and the immediate feedback helps keep interest and motivation

"Question Time" is the name I have given to those first five to ten minutes of a lesson Before listening to a passage, I always asked some questions so that students would have some ideas about the topic before they listened In this process of doing the warm-up activity, students could build on their prior knowledge and at the same time, use vocabulary and structures that are connected with a particular function

For example , when teaching the students unit 12 in English 10 with the title Music,

I encourage my students to discuss the questions below:

1 Do you know Van Cao?

2 What’s his job?

3 When/ where was he born?

4 Is he still alive?

5 When did he die?

6.Which of the songs were written by him?

After that I intruduce the topic : Today you are going to listen to an interview in which Lan Huong, the interviewer, asks Quang Hung, a famous actor about Van Cao

In this way, students can be aware of the purpose of the exercise in general and the nature of the specific task in particular before they listen to the passage The "Question Time" activity can do much in listening classes, such as creating a friendly atmosphere between the teacher and the students, building the students' confidence and having the thrill of something spontaneous Above all, it makes students feel interested and gets them involved in the listening activities

I give a topic and ask learners to think of anything related to it I write the responses for all to see, or ask a volunteer to do the writing I can use this to elicit vocabulary related to your lesson

Ex : Unit 3: People’s background ( Grade 10 )

I ask my students to work in pairs and talk about Olympic and Olympic

Champions

Suggest the questions:

1 What do you know about Olympic ?

2 What do you know about Olympic champions?

3 What do you want to know about an Olympic champion ?

Then I gather ideas that my students discuss and give some background

information about Olympic and Olympic Champions

d Describe the Picture

I show a picture and have learners take turns saying one descriptive thing about

it Beginners can make simple observations like "three cats" while advanced students can make up a story to go with the picture They aren't allowed to repeat what someone else said, so they need to pay attention when each person speaks

Variation for individual: take turns with the teacher

Ex : Unit 8 : The story of my village ( Grade 10 )

I ask students to work in pairs to discuss the differences between the two pictures

2 STAGES OF A LISTENING LESSON

a Pre-listening stage

This stage prepares students by getting them to think about the topic or situation before they listen to the texts In other words, it gives students a purpose to listen It also gets students to relate to what they already know about the topic and not least important arouse their interest in listening

There are certain goals that should be achieved before students attempt to listen to any text These are motivation, contextualization, and preparation

Motivation

It is enormously important that before listening students are motivated to listen, so you should try to select a text that they will find interesting and then design tasks that will arouse your students' interest and curiosity

Contextualization

When we listen in our everyday lives we hear language within its natural environment, and that environment gives us a huge amount of information about the linguistic content we are likely to hear Listening to a tape recording in a classroom is

a very unnatural process The text has been taken from its original environment and we need to design tasks that will help students to contextualize the listening and access their existing knowledge and expectations to help them understand the text

Preparation

To do the task we set students while they listen there could be specific vocabulary or

expressions that students will need It's vital that we cover this before they start to listen as we want the challenge within the lesson to be act of listening not of understanding what they have to do

Pre-tasks can be:

- Introducing general content of the listening passage

- Making use of pictures (if any) to present new vocabulary

- Presenting more words/phrases from tape scripts

- Getting students to pronounce words/phrases carefully

- Reviewing already-presented grammatical patterns

- Presenting new grammatical patterns (if any)

- Asking students to predict content of the listening

Ex:Unit 1: A day in the life of (Grade 10)