Ministry of higher and secondary specialized education of the republic of uzbekistan

The structure of the course work consists of an introduction, two chapters, a conclusion and the list of used literature.


CHAPTER I Problematic views of listening skill

1.1 Theory problems of listening notion

It is clear that, English is an official language throughout the world. Among speaking, reading and writing, listening is one of the four foundations of communication and plays a key role in the English language. Among above mentioned skills listening performs an important function in the success of English language learning. Despite of using widely, listening section has appeared with countless problematic conditions such as theory problems, issues in teaching and learning and others. In order to solve dilemmas there are numerous ways and strategies of learning and teaching listening skill.

“Listening is vital in the language classroom because it provides input for the learners. Without understanding input at the right level, any learner simply can’t begin”³. “Listening plays an important role in communication and the total time spent on communicating, listening takes up 40-50%; speaking, 25-30%; reading, 11-16%; and writing, about 9%”⁴. From given the information we may guess the importance of listening among other three sections and in the classes.

In order to know and comprehend better English, we should be aware of overcoming of the listening problems. Before putting emphasize on listening problems, understanding the meaning of listening will be true. It refers to the ability to hearing process, interpret and respond to spoken messages. Moreover, listening is crucial in communication between a speaker and a listener. Countless researches have been introduced about listening, its various strategies and methods, problems in learning and teaching. Owing to the variety researches and scientists’ viewpoints problematic conditions of listening notion has appeared today. The main reason to write theory problems of listening ability is that there is a limited works about theoretical issues. A lot of scholars have paid attention to overcome and give suggestions to the dilemmas, not the origin of the problems. In the below an emphasize will be put on different opinions and conclusions that have caused theory problems.

Not only English scientists but also scholars of non-native countries of the English language have done so many researches. Learning deeply the listening ability is a demand of English analysis sphere. As above mentioned listening comprehension has been defined by various researchers, in which Gary Buck gave a definition in very clear words. According to Gary Buck “listening comprehension is an active process of constructing meaning and this is done by applying knowledge to the incoming sound” in which “number of different types of knowledge are involved: both linguistic and no –linguistic knowledge”⁵. He supposed that “comprehension is affected by a wide range of variables and that potentially any characteristic of the speaker, the situation or the listener can affect the comprehension of the message”⁶. There are a lot of controversies on the nature of listening comprehension. According to Anderson and Lynch, “there are two influential views: traditional view and alternative view. Traditional view regarded the listener as a tape-recorder and the listener took in and stored aural messages in much the same way as a tape-recorder”⁷. They criticized this view as inappropriate and inadequate. “This notion is not a tenable one. Alternative view considered the listener as an active model builder. This kind of listener could combine the new information with his previous knowledge and experience to reach full comprehension of what had been heard”⁸. Anderson and Lynch agreed with this view and emphasized the active interpretation and integration of incoming information with prior knowledge and experience.

Clark and Clark gave both a narrow and broad definition of listening comprehension “Comprehension has two common senses. In its narrow sense it denotes the mental processes by which listeners take in the sounds uttered by a speaker and use them to construct an interpretation of what they think the speaker intended to convey. Comprehension in its broader sense, however, rarely ends here, for listeners normally put the interpretations they have built to work”⁹.

“Listening comprehension process consists of three steps: receiving, attending and understanding in sequence. The understanding step may be followed by responding and remembering as listeners may respond immediately or remember the message to respond at a later time”¹⁰.

Listening is not a single skill. It includes many different components and is a complex process involving an interaction between listeners, speakers and spoken texts. Michael Rost divided listening into two elements: “the component skills and what a listener does. What a listener does is a list of activities that listeners take to understand messages. The listeners must take decisions of things such as the kind of situation, important words or units of meaning”¹¹.Listening comprehension is of great importance in foreign language learning.

From above mentioned viewpoints, I tend to say that listening is a vital part of the English language and it is a type of communication. As we witnessed, there are so many opinions about listening and listening comprehension and all scholars be decisive in their viewpoints and this process led to theory problems.

“Although the teaching of listening comprehension has long been ―somewhat neglected and poorly taught aspect of English in many EFL programs”¹².Actually, listening is now regarded as much more important in both EFL classrooms and researches. “Listening involves an active process of deciphering and constructing meaning from both verbal and non-verbal messages”¹³.

In order to take part in communication activities, it is clear that listeners must have the ability to absorb the information from speakers through listening. Since listening is important to understand spoken message, the teaching of listening cannot be neglected from the teaching of English.

To sum up, listening is a notion that requires a big attention to define correctly and understand well. In order not to confuse about real theory of listening firstly, we should compare scholars’ opinions and summarize ourselves. From my point of view various opinions, quite number of researches on comprehending the word listening may be considered as reasons of appearing problematic theories.