Issues in development of listening skills

General Principles In Teaching Listening Comprehension

Listening comprehension (LC) lessons must have definite goals, carefully stated. These goals should fit into the overall curriculum, and both teacher and students should be clearly cognizant of what they are.
1. Listening comprehension lessons should be constructed with careful step by step planning. This implies, that the listening tasks progress from simple to more complex as the student gains in language proficiency; that the student knows exactly what the task is and is given directions as to ―what to listen for, where to listen, when to listen, and how to listen.''
2. LC lesson structure should demand active overt student participation. The ―most overt student participation involves his written response to the LC material,'' and that immediate feedback on performance helps keep interest and motivation at high levels.
3. LC lesson should provide a communicative urgency for remembering in order to develop concentration. This urgency, which along with concentration is a key factor in remembering, should come not from the teacher, but from the lesson itself. This is done by giving the students the writing assignment before they listen to the material.
4. Listening comprehension lessons should stress conscious memory work. One of the goals of listening is to strengthen the students‘ immediate recall in order to increase their memory spans. ''Listening is receiving, receiving requires thinking, and thinking requires memory; there is no way to separate listening, thinking, remembering.''
5. Listening comprehension lessons should ―teach,‖ not ―test.‖ This means that the purpose of checking the students‘ answers should be viewed only as feedback, as a way of letting the students‘ find out how they did and how they are progressing. There should be no pass/fail attitude associated with the correction of the exercises (Paulston & Bruder, 1976).¹⁷
Listening comprehension is divided into four main sections: Attentive listening; Intensive listening; Selective listening; Interactive listening.
Each section helps students develop a range of skills and strategies.
Attentive listening is designed to give students practice with listening and with supplying short responses to the speaker, either verbally or non-verbally (through actions). Because this kind of ‘responsive’ listening involves immediate processing of information and quick decisions about how to respond, the activities in Section I provide a great deal of support to help the learners ‘process’ the information they hear.
The support is of three types: linguistic, in the form of cue words and previewed utterances, non-linguistic, in the form of visual aids, photographs, tangible objects and music used in the activity, and interactional, in the form of repetitions, paraphrases and confirmation checks by the speaker. By providing this support, the activities allow the teacher to introduce real-time listening practice to students at all levels, including beginners. Because the support in each activity can be varied, teachers can utilise these activities with more proficient students as well, to help them increase their attention span for spoken English.
Intensive listening will focus the students’ attention on language form. The aim of this section is to raise the learners’ awareness of how differences in sound, structure, and lexical choice can affect meaning. Because this kind of listening involves an appreciation of how form affects meaning, all of the activities in this section are contextualised - placed in a real or easily imagined situation (Brown J..1995, p.10) In this way, all students - even beginners - can practise intensive listening in a context of language use, from which it is most likely to transfer to ‘real life’ listening situation. Because the activities in this section require attention to specific contrasts of form - grammatical, lexical, or phonological - the teacher can easily adapt the activities to more proficient students by increasing the complexity of the language forms.¹⁸
Selective listening will help enable students to identify a purpose for listening. By providing focused information-based tasks, the activities in Section III help direct the students’ attention on key words, discourse sequence cues, or ‘information structures’ (exchanges in which factual information is given). By learning to attend to words, cues, and facts selectively, students at all levels come to handle short naturalistic text (such as announcements) as well as longer and more complex texts (such as authentic video programmes). Because the task support in these activities can be adjusted, Section III is useful for students at all proficiency levels.
Interactive listening is designed to help learners assume active roles in shaping and controlling an interaction, even when they are in the ‘listener’s role’. Because it is important for learners to take an active role as listeners, each activity in this section has a built-in need for information or classification questions by the listener. In order to work toward the goal of active participation by the listener, the students themselves - rather than the teacher or an audio or video tape - become the focus of the activity. To this end, in Section IV, listening skills are developed in the context of interaction - mainly through information gap pair work, jigsaw groups, and student presentations and reports (Rost, M., 1994,p.10)
The listening process is often described from an information processing perspective as "an active process in which listeners select and interpret information that comes from auditory and visual clues in order to define what is going on and what the speakers are trying to express" (Thompson & Rubin, 1996, p. 331). Considering various aspects of listening comprehension, (Underwood 1989 p.15) organizes the major listening problems as follows:

1. 
   lack of control over the speed at which speakers speak ,
   
2. 
   not being able to get things repeated,
   
3. 
   the listener's limited vocabulary,
   
4. 
   failure to recognize the "signals,"
   
5. 
   problems of interpretation,
   
6. 
   inability to concentrate, and
   
7. 
   established learning habits.
   

Underwood (1989,p.7) sees these problems as being related to learners' different backgrounds, such as their culture and education. She points out that students whose culture and education includes a strong storytelling and oral communication tradition are generally "better" at listening comprehension than those from a reading and book-based cultural and educational background. Moreover, learners whose native language possesses the stress and intonation features similar to those of English are likely to have less trouble than the learners whose L1 is based on different rhythms and tones. Under these assumptions, the learners in the present study, of Chinese background, appear to operate under the least-optimal English language learning circumstances.¹⁹
Focusing on EFL learners with Chinese language backgrounds,( Goh ,2000 p.10) investigated listening comprehension problems in students in college EFL studies. T he data were collected from learner diaries, small group interviews, and immediate retrospective verbalization²⁰. Findings include ten listening comprehension problems in relation to three cognitive processing phases--perceptions, parsing, and utilization, proposed by (Anderson 1983, 1995. p 12). Perceptual processing refers to maintaining attention to spoken input, parsing means encoding the input to establish a meaningful representation in short-term memory, and utilization concerns using the background knowledge to interpret the input for storage.
First, in the perception stage, learners reported most difficulties as: "do not recognize words they know," "neglect the next part when thinking about meaning," "cannot chunk streams of speech," "miss the beginning of texts," and "concentrate too hard or unable to concentrate." Second, in the parsing stage, (Goh , 2000,p.10) found that listeners complained of problems such as "quickly forget what is heard," "unable to form a mental representation from words heard," and "do not understand subsequent parts of input because of earlier problems." Third, in the utilization stage, "understand the words but not the intended message" and "confused about the key ideas in the message" were often mentioned. These reported difficulties partially reflect (Underwood's ,1989,p.9 ) views on L2/FL listening problems. However, as learners attempt to incorporate certain strategies into the listening process, they are likely to face different challenges or problems.