Teaching Micro-skills of Listening - Research Paper Example

EFL: Teaching Micro-skills of Listening Listening, as an effective receptive language skill, assumes a significant place in learning English as a second language even though it has been regarded as a passive language skill in the past. In the initial levels of listening it is imperative that the second language learners get familiarized with the tone, stress and rhythmic pattern of the target language through careful listening. One of the major challenges before an EFL/ESL teacher is to provide appropriate and comprehensible listening inputs to the learners according to their linguistic capabilities and language proficiencies. Both attention theories and conversation theories stress second language listening for different reasons. While Attention Theories support the use of “consciousness-raising activities to increase learners’ awareness of grammatical structures” conversation theories associated with Communicative Language Teaching “stress the importance of second language listening since it is not possible to participate in a conversation and take advantage of conversational feedback without understanding what your partner is saying” (Horwitz, 2008, p. 67). It is thus evident that sufficient exposure to the target language is an essential prerequisite for developing any micro-skills of listening. In an EFL classroom listening plays a dominant role and as such the ESL teachers have a pivotal responsibility in choosing the most appropriate activities and listening comprehension passages that cater best to the language needs of the learners. The second language teacher needs to take into account the background knowledge of the learner on a particular topic and familiarize the content of the listening comprehension through effective previewing. Similarly, the use of advance organizers “to help integrate new information into the student’s pre-existing knowledge” also is significant (Horwitz, 2008, p. 68). In the same way, it is the duty of the ESL teacher to facilitate effective listening process through carefully chosen meaning support- “the practice of providing pictures, sound effects, and the like to make listening and reading materials more comprehensible to students” (Horwitz, 2008, p. 68). Once the listening comprehension text (oral or written) is offered to the learners with ample meaning support the learners need to recall the ideas they are able to remember and for this the teacher can make use of recall questions to elicit responses from the students. These listening comprehension questions should be both engaging and appropriate. Similarly, inference questions can also be made use of in order to assess whether the students have understood the oral or written text correctly. Intonation (rising and falling of the tone of voice) is another aspect that is related to effective listening skills. It is essential to understand the various obstacles to teaching listening comprehension from an EFL point of view. It can be found that classroom listening which is created artificial often differ considerably from that of the natural real world listening. As realistic conversations and listening opportunities in the target language are often difficult to arrange in a classroom setting it is imperative that the ESL teachers choose listening activities and listening comprehension materials that would offer true exposure to the target language spoken by the native users of the language. While introducing commercial productions of CD-ROM or DVD in the classroom (which may sound easier for the ESL learners compared to the language spoken by native speakers) the ESL teacher should convince the learners that these differ from authentic speech uttered by the target language community. Similarly, it is also important to convince the learners of both the formal and informal varieties of the target language to facilitate meaningful listening. Similarly, natural listening experiences take place in a definite context and offer greater opportunities and communicative redundancies for the listeners to grasp the meaning of the oral text. On the other hand, classroom listening does not offer the learners any such redundancies and the learners have no scope to recover the missed details (Horwitz, 2008, p. 71). The various obstacles to effective listening have been documented by other researchers as well. In this respect, Underwood (1989) points out that there are seven conceivable obstacles to effective listening. These include the listeners’ inability to control the speed of delivery of the speech; their inability to get the words repeated; their inability to recognize the signals; their lack of contextual knowledge; their inability to concentrate on a foreign language for longer duration; and, their preoccupation to understand each every word they hear (Underwood, 1989, pp. 16-18). Similarly, the unrealistic expectations of the learners and their inability to indulge in effective top-down processing and bottom-up processing can also hamper effective listening comprehension. Therefore, it is imperative that an effective ESL teacher has a thorough understanding of these obstacles and keeping these obstacles in mind he/she needs to offer effective scaffolding as and when it is necessary in the listening process. The listening process consists of various levels and types of listening. While the types of listening can be categorized into active listening, intensive listening, responsive listening, semantic listening, extensive listening and interactive listening Horwitz makes clear that the various steps of listening are recognition of the target language, recognition of isolated words, recognition of phrase boundaries, listening for the gist and true listening (Horwitz, 2008, pp. 73-74). First of all, the learners need to recognize the overall sound of the target language and they should be able to distinguish the target language from other languages. For this, listening activities such as listening to songs, rhymes, extended conversations, music, popular movies and radio broadcasts are found to be effective. In the next stage of listening comprehension the learners start recognizing such isolated words as cognates, famous and common names, or vocabulary words. The activities may vary from showing videotapes of familiar television commercials, short narrations about famous people, places or events to simple re-combinations of classroom materials. In the next stage the learners can be asked to recognize various phrase boundaries varying from individual words, phrases, to sentence boundaries (Horwitz, 2008, p. 74). Physical response activities and listening to CD-ROMS are identified as beneficial at this stage. During the next stage the students should be encouraged to listen for the gist whereby they can grasp the global meaning and main points of the written or oral text; for Horwitz (2008, p. 74) “preparation for listening and the use of meaning support are essential at this stage, as is re-listening” (Horwitz, 2008, p. 74). This is followed by the last stage of listening where true listening occurs. At this stage the students “begin to follow the meaning of a passage, although they will continue to encounter many words and phrases they do not understand” (Horwitz, 2008, p. 74). As ESL teacher has the responsibility to take his/her learners through all these stages of listening through appropriate learning activities and strategies. Researches in the field of teaching English as a Foreign Language have brought about a number of models and strategies in teaching listening skills to second language learners. The large number of literature on listening reviewed by Berne (1998) stressed on the importance of repetition of passages, pre-listening activities, effectiveness of videotapes over audiotapes, use of authentic listening passages over pedagogical listening passages, and the need to formulate effective listening strategies (Berne , 1998, pp. 169-170). Similarly, Horwitz (2008, p. 74) has stressed on the significance of the context for listening, repeated listening, and follow up questions. The idea of prior knowledge, schemata, and cognitive model of language processing which makes use of both top-down and bottom-up processing have been pointed out by Brown. While top-down processing refers to the listener’s our prior knowledge and experiences bottom-up processing “means using the information we have about sounds, word meanings, and discourse markers like first, then and after that to assemble our understanding of what we read or hear one step at a time” (Brown, 2006, p. 2). Brown (2006, p. 10) has also emphasised systematic presentation of listening for main ideas, listening for details, and listening and making inferences; integration of real-world cultural information; and the introduction of extensive listening tasks leading to personalized speaking. The significance of background cultural knowledge has also been pointed out by Horwitz (2008) as well. Mendelsohn (1994) has propagated a ‘strategy-based approach’ to the teaching of listening and the underlying principles for the structure of his listening unit consists of attending to awareness and consciousness-raising, using pre-listening activities, focusing the listening, providing guided activities, practicing with real data, and using what has been comprehended (Chen, 2005, p. 6). It is essential to keep in mind these theoretical insights when one thinks of teaching any particular micro skills of listening to middle school students of intermediate level in China. Listening comprehension skills can be categorised into various micro-skills each of which addresses a specific listening skill. In this respect, Richards (1983) categorises micro-skills of listening into two: conversational listening skills and academic listening skills. He lists down 33 specific conversational and 18 academic listening skills. Middle school students should develop competent conversational micro-skills before they move to colleges to learn more of academic listening skills. Therefore, one particular micro-skill of conversational listening is chosen for the study-“ability to recognize the functions of stress and intonation to signal the information structure of utterances” (Richards, 1983). It is true that many middle school learners mishear English sounds mainly because they are not familiar with the stress and intonation pattern of the language. Students should be taught such aspects as syllables (stressed and unstressed), word stress (primary and secondary stress), tone groups and sentence stress. For this, it is essential for the second language learner to develop more familiarity with the common phonemes of the target language and to realize the fact that stress and intonation patterns of English have a direct relation to “the realization of certain phonemes and the meaning of the utterance” (Ur, 1984, p. 12). The general stress and intonation patterns of English should be made known to the learners through effective listening activities and strategies. It is also essential for the learners to understand the colloquial vocabulary and to cope up with the redundancy and noise in the oral listening text. There should be sufficient learning activities in the classroom to teach learners of the weak forms, disappearance of negatives and function words, different accents and individual variations of the native speaker. The students should also be taught to learn from visual and aural environmental clues. A number of learning activities are needed to teach the learners the micro-skill of understanding the stress and intonation pattern of English language. First of all, all the phonemes and diphthongs of the language are to be familiarised to the learners through a number of examples. Secondly, the concept of syllables or tone groups should be revealed to them through monosyllabic, disyllabic and multisyllabic words. The concept of word stress (both primary and secondary) can also be practiced using the same set of words. Thirdly, the concept of sentence stress and intonation patterns can be revealed to the learners through carefully chosen sentences and passages. In this stage, the ESL teacher should elaborately deal with the weak forms, disappearance of negatives and function words, different accents and individual variations of the native speaker. The students can then listen to a number of nursery rhymes and radio news to further understand the stress and intonation pattern of the language. As part of the listening activity the learners can be shown a native English movie with English subtitles. The ESL teacher can then make the learners listen to a speech by a native speaker twice-first without any supporting materials and secondly with the printed handouts of the speech. Finally, the learners can listen to a recorded natural conversation between two native speakers and can make a note of the conversation as understood by them. All these learning activities supported by timely scaffolding from the ESL teacher are sure to develop the ability of the learners to recognize the functions of stress and intonation in the English language. Any discussion of EFL is incomplete without mentioning the roles of the ESL teacher. The ultimate aim of the ESL programs is to improve the English language proficiency of the identified ESL learners and to make them competent enough to communicate with their peers and their teachers, participate in the classroom activities and to achieve learning outcomes as the first language learners. As ESL teaching is a complex process that demands professional competence, dedication and a sound knowledge of the various strategies and practices associated with second language teaching, ESL teachers have a pivotal role in the teaching learning process of English as a second language. One of the great challenges of the ESL teacher is to provide targeted, curriculum-based English language instruction to meet the linguistic learning needs of the students. For this, the ESL teachers should be aware of the importance of the learning environment, should scaffold on the previous learning experiences of the learner, identify the specific learning needs of the learners, make sequence of activities and modification of learning activities in tune with the language proficiency of the students, build on principles of Second Language Acquisition, and constantly plan, assess and evaluate the progress made by the learners (Sharpe, 2004, p. 2-3). Scaffolding lay at the heart of ESL learning and effective scaffolding is essential to teach learners any of the micro-skills of listening. The primary objective of scaffolding is to make the ESL students independent learners and an effective ESL teacher can promote both social and linguistic learning through scaffolding support” (Rose & Acevedo 2006, p. 36). In short, the ESL teacher has got a pivotal role in designing the listening resources, learning activities, support systems and effective strategies in tune with the language proficiency of the ESL learners. References Berne, J. E. (1998). Examining the relationship between L2 listening research, pedagogical theory, and Practice. Foreign Language Annals, 31, 169-190. Brown, Steven. (2006). Teaching Listening. New York: Cambridge University Press. Chen, Y. (2005). Barriers to Acquiring Listening Strategies for EFL Learners and Their Pedagogical Implications. TESL-EJ, 8 (4). Retrieved 26 May 2012, from: http://www.cc.kyoto-su.ac.jp/information/tesl-ej/ej32/a2.html Horwitz, E.K. (2008). Becoming a language teacher: A practical guide to second language learning and teaching. Boston: Allyn and Bacon. Richards, Jack, C. (1983). Listening Comprehension: Approach, Design, Procedure. TESOL Quarterly. 17 (2). Rose, D. & Acevedo, C. (2006). Closing the gap and accelerating learning in the Middle Years of Schooling. Australian Journal of Language and Literacy, 14 (2). Sharpe, T. (July, 2004). So what is ‘special’ about an ESL teacher? In ATESOL Newsletter, 3 (2). Underwood, M. (1989). Teaching Listening. London: Longman. Ur, Penny. (1984). Teaching Listening Comprehension. Illustrated ed: Cambridge University Press. Read More