Listening skills in English as a foreign language

1.2 Approaches to teaching listening skills
For expanding traditional content of listening programs, teachers should introduce greater variety in the types of input offered to the second language listener. Teachers should match the type of listening required of the listener as closely as is practical to what would be expected in a real communicative context (Field, 2008, p. 63). Approaches to teaching listening skills In order to apply the approaches to teaching listening skill, teachers should first think about how their students listen in real life and give them accordingly the opportunity to listen actively providing different accents, useful and different topics, as well as situations that students can use in their real world. When teachers are teaching listening, it is very important to follow a pattern. Bueno, Madrid & Mclaren (2006, pp. 409-441) established the following pattern: Pre-listening would be the first stage, where the context is established. The teacher creates motivation and students do some activities with the purpose of preparing them for what they will hear. The following stage is listening, where learners do tasks or find answers. And the last stage is post-listening, which is the part where students have the opportunity to check their answers and consolidate what they have learnt. It is useful for teachers because it helps to analyze particular difficulties the students could have with the listening activity. The complexity of the listening process comes from its double psychological and social nature, which needs to be understood in order for teachers to be able to introduce the listening process and subsequently evaluate it. It is a psychological phenomenon, which takes place on a cognitive level inside people’s heads, and a social phenomenon, which develops interactively between people and the environment surrounding them
A possible approach to teaching listening is to identify the wide range of everyday listening events and then consider how the listener would be most likely to handle the input and how he or she would be most likely to respond. The next list of a number of listening events suggests the types of listener behavior that are most appropriate to each.
Authentic materials, such as films, TV programs and real conversations frequently contain fast speech, redundancy, ungrammatical utterances, which tend to cause students to feel confused, frustrated, and de-motivated. However, this can be solved by choosing appropriate materials, which are challenging and interesting and by assigning tasks, which involve focused listening such as "listening for gist" and "listening for main ideas." In short, as Lund (1990) claims, “difficulty of authentic materials should be considered an attribute of tasks rather than texts” (p. 113). Even difficult materials could be useful for developing listening ability by giving students simple tasks
In using appropriate materials, three aspects should be taken into consideration. The first is that teachers should make students aware of the importance of not trying to completely understand authentic materials. Teachers should help students predict meaning based on their partial comprehension (Guarientor & Morley, 2001, p. 348). The second is that teachers need to teach students how to listen to authentic materials. To realize this purpose, the following suggestions and procedure offered by Dunkel (1995) would be effective: The listeners are given needed background information about the general topic to activate their schemata and help them predict some of the content of the message; learners listen to the discourse segments at least four times with varied and focused listening tasks set for each listening; the comprehension tasks proceed from the general to the specific and detailed; and the learners are asked to discuss and react to the information heard after the final listening cycle (Dunkel, 1995, p. 102). By activating students' schemata, doing focused listening, and emphasizing the process of listening, authentic materials can be used for fostering students' listening ability. The last variable to consider when using authentic materials is that authentic activities are needed as Porter & Roberts (1987, pp. 37-47) claim. Teachers do not ask students for one correct answer but make it easier for students to decide what to do based on listening and learning. This activity enables students to feel they are learning English as real communication and for a useful purpose.
Post-listening activities should be integrated with other skills, such as speaking, reading, and writing as in real life. Listening, speaking, reading and writing are interrelated and interdependent. In light of this point, appropriate classroom activities should be considered to integrate listening with speaking, reading and writing. As Mendelsohn (1994) states, “This post-listening activity is a good opportunity to integrate the listening with work in other skills, for example, by having students do a piece of writing or oral reporting on what they have been listening to” (p. 57). Furthermore, as Hedge (2000) claims, “Post-listening work can also usefully involve integration with other skills through development of the topic into reading, speaking, or writing activities. If materials follow this route, it becomes important to ensure that new sources of motivation arise for students other than the interest of the original text” (p. 252). Therefore, making good use of post-listening activities leads to developing students' language abilities and motivating students because they can feel they are learning language as meaningful communication
Students should listen to a variety of authentic materials. Indeed, the purpose of language learning is that the learners can come to make use of the target language in the real world, not just in the classroom. However, if the learners are accustomed to artificial materials, they cannot fulfill this purpose. As Herron & Seay (1991) claim, “Teachers are urged to exploit more authentic text (e.g., video and film, radio broadcasts, television programs) in all levels of foreign language instruction in order to involve students in activities that mirror real life listening contexts” (p. 488). Moreover, as Brown (2001) explains, “Authentic language and real-world tasks enable students to see the relevance of classroom activity to their long-term communicative goals” (p. 258). Namely, authentic materials aid students to become involved in the classroom activity. Furthermore, listening to authentic texts gives learners useful practice to grasp the information needed without necessarily understanding every word or structure (Herron & Seay, 1991, p. 493). Role of teacher Nunan (2001, p. 219) urges teachers to make the learners conscious of what they are doing and of the process of learning and introduces the following eight strategies: listening for gist; listening for purpose; listening for main idea; listening for inference; listening for specific information; listening for phonetic distinctions; listening for tone/pitch to identify speaker's attitude; and listening for stress. Basic skills for listening comprehension should be taught and schema-building activities should precede the listening activity. If the students learn strategies for effective listening, their reading and writing skills would improve as well The basic skills for listening comprehension include understanding word boundaries and reduced forms by perceiving the differences in intonation and knowing what they mean, perceiving stressed or unstressed words, understanding word boundaries and reduced forms. Dunkel (1986) reports, "Effective communication depends on whether the listener and speaker share a common “semantic field” (p. 103). In short, without common schemata or scripts between the speaker and listener, effective communication will not occur (Mendelsohn, 1994, p. 55). Therefore, teachers should provide listeners with the background information needed to understand the message before asking students to listen to a segment of discourse (Dunkel, 1995, p. 102). Different researchers give different examples for activating the students’ schemata. Richards (1987, p. 234) states that the schema-building activities may take the form of discussion, questions, or a short paragraph to read, which creates the script, providing information about the situation, the characters and the events. Oxford (1993, p. 210) introduces the following suggestions: Pre-listening tasks such as, discussing the topic, brainstorming, presenting vocabulary, sharing related articles must be used to stimulate the appropriate background knowledge and help learners identify the purpose of the listening activity.
Based on these concepts, the researcher divided schema-building activities in the research school project into three categories. The first stage is a pre-listening activity to 41 determine how much background knowledge about the topic students have by asking some questions, brainstorming and using visual materials. The students are asked to guess and predict the actual content of the listening materials before listening to them. The second stage is a while-listening activity, which is to listen to a song and answer the exercise. The third stage is a post-listening activity. The students test their memory by listening to part of the song and try to answer the questions of the exercise. The students have an opportunity to adjust their first thoughts about the content of the topic according to the actual content of the listening material. These activities result in stimulating students' interest and making them aware of the reason for listening. Listening strategies Robin & Gou (2006) define listening strategies as techniques or activities that facilitate the direct comprehension and recall of the listening input. They describe these strategies as metacognitive, cognitive and socio affective (Robin & Gou, 2006, p. 4). Metacognitive strategies concern what listeners do for managing, regulating, or directing their learning before, during and after the listening. They include planning, monitoring and evaluating. Cognitive strategies are those concerned with handling the input or material or implementing a definite skill or strategy to do a special task in two significant processes of bottom up and top-down (Holden, 2004). In top down processing listeners recognize the topic of a conversation or make predictions about the listening passages, but in bottom up processing listeners focus on the meaning of vocabulary or the syntax cues of the text. Socio-affective strategies, meanwhile, are defined as the technique’s listeners use to collaborate with others, to verify understanding or to lower anxiety (Vandergrift, 2003).
According to Mendelsohn (1994), some strategies, such as guessing, should be taught to the learners to compensate for the lack of understanding (Mendelsohn, 1994). Moreover, “through these, students will not only become better listeners, they will also become more effective language learners” (Nunan, 2001, p. 218). Guo (2007) emphasizes using all types of listening skills and strategies in the first phase in a listening class for acquiring a comprehensive ability to listen effectively in different situations to different types of input, and for a variety of listening purposes. According to Holden (2004) “the limited numbers of studies so far in listening strategy instruction suggest that learners can be instructed in strategy use, and that doing so enhances their performance on listening tasks” (p. 260). Vandergrift et al. (2006) refer to some researchers as Bolitho et al. (2003), Victori & Lockhart (1995), Wilson (2003) who believe that awareness of strategies and other variables in learning can have positive effects on language learners’ listening improvement (see also Marzban & Isazadeh, 2012, p. 2). The Norwegian researcher Hildegunn Otnes (1997; 1999a; 1999b) points out the importance of relational listening in conversation with concepts like “attention” and “response”. Gary (1975) also suggests that that giving priority to listening comprehension, especially in the early stages of EFL/ESL, has cognitive efficiency and affective advantages (Vandergrift, 1999).
Researchers classify listening strategies in different ways. H. D. Brown (2001) emphasizes that teaching effective listening strategies improves the chance of students becoming good learners. He presents the following eight strategies: looking for key words, looking for nonverbal cues to meaning, predicting a speaker's purpose by the context of the spoken discourse, associating information with one's existing cognitive structure (activating guessing at meanings), seeking clarification, listening for the general gist and various testtaking strategies for listening comprehension. Using a different division method, Mendelsohn (1995) separates listening strategies into seven major categories: strategies to determine setting; strategies to determine interpersonal relations; strategies to determine mood; strategies to determine topic; strategies to determine the essence of the meaning of an utterance; strategies to form hypotheses, predictions and inferences; and strategies to determine the main idea of a passage. The researcher has adopted in this study a simplified classification so that students can learn strategies easily. The researcher has divided the strategies into four kinds: 1) Appreciative listening. 2) listening for the gist (main ideas) or to predict. 3) listening for specific information. 4) listening to make inferences. Appreciative listening is when the students listen to the song to enjoy it without worrying about questions. Listening for the gist does not involve asking detailed questions; instead students have to grasp the main ideas without worrying about the details. They can guess or predict the meaning of what they cannot understand by using clues such as key words. Also, listening for specific information involves asking the students more detailed questions. Finally, listening to make inference can be done on the basis of evidence and reasoning.
Purdy & Borisoff (1997) state that throughout Western history, it was assumed that listening was automatic and needed no attention. People did not concern themselves with studying or training in the art of listening. Listening, however, is not automatic. To be good listeners, people need to understand and work with the components of the listening process. They need to know that listening is an active process, involving mind and body, with verbal and nonverbal processes working together. It is the process that allows them to be receptive to the needs, concerns and information of others, as well as the environment around them. Listening is comprised of seven essential components: volition, focused attention, perception, interpretation, remembering, response, and the human element. These seven components are an integral part of the dynamic and active process of listening.
First, for an individual to be able to listen, he or she must want to listen. Thus, the will to listen is the initial component of effective listening (Nicholas & Stevens, 1957, pp. 51-52). Second, good listening requires focused attention. Third is perception, which is being aware of all of the elements of the message, speaker and context. The fourth component is the capacity to interpret the messages and meanings of others. The process of interpretation includes understanding in terms of the listener’s own experience. The fifth component of listening includes remembering through retaining heard information. A sixth component is the need for response. Giving a feedback is essential to completing the process of good listening. The seventh and last component is the human being. In listening one must always 45 be receptive to the personal element and the information that is colored by his needs and concerns (Purdy, 2009, pp. 3-4). Different definitions of listening would lead to different models of the listening process. One widely respected and used model is constructed by Judi Brownell (1996, p. 147) and consists of six components in the so-called HURIER listening process. The six components are Hearing, Understanding, Remembering, Interpreting, Evaluating and Responding. According to the HURIER model there are six listening tasks and there are many skills of listening reception associated with each of the six components. These skills either specify or ease every stage.