Module teaching and integrating language skills lesson 1

Pre- explaining part. 10 min
Give students Handout 1.

Handout 1. While learning the L2, certainly you have faced the problems with listening. Without doubt, you found out your strategy of improving, whereas each strategy is not exception from the problems. Complete the following table with the strategy that you did in order to improve your listening skill, with the problem that you faced and the solution that you suggest. Strategy Problem of this strategy your solution Listening to music Difficult and different pronunciation To find the lyrics

While-explaining part.55 min
Objective: To raise Ss awareness on improving listening proficiency
Time: 30 min
Materials: Handout2, 3
Procedure:

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  Divide group into 2 teams,
  
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  Distribute Handout 1 to the team 1, and Handout 2 to the team 2.
  
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  Ss should read and get ready to discuss it.
  

Members from team 1 retell the problem of listening from the article and opposite team should retell the suggestion.
For example:
Problem 1: Too much faith in first language research
Fourteen years ago, Anderson and Lynch (1988: 21) noted that there was very little research into listening in a second language. Because of this gap in research, applied linguists, textbook writers, and teacher trainers have gone to research in first language listening for guidance. As a result, listening comprehension exercises are greatly (and in my view inappropriately) influenced by what is known about successful first language listening.
First language research has established that successful listening is characterized by:
• listening for a purpose
• making predictions based on contextual information
• making guesses when things aren't clear
• inferring what is meant where necessary
• not listening ('straining') for every word
(adapted from Brown 1990: 148)
Teacher trainers and textbook writers have made appropriate use of some of these findings, and inappropriate use of others. In particular they have taken the last of these points ('they don't listen for every word') and have made it an article of faith. They advocate 'top-down' activities and urge the avoidance of any activity which could be characterised as 'bottom-up'. Of course, we should be careful about this particular issue: we don't want learners to strain so much to hear every word that they cannot understand anything. In my view though, it is a mistake to abandon, as we have, bottom-up activities which introduce learners to the essential characteristics of speech.
From first language research comes the teacher's standard advice in a listening lesson: 'You won't be able to understand every word, and you don't need to'. I find this explanation illogical: the 'reasoning' goes something like this:
1. non-natives don't understand
2. natives understand without paying attention to every word
3. therefore, in order to understand, non-natives should not try to pay attention to every word
The first statement describes the problem which all listening classes address in some way; the second is a research finding; the third is the false deduction. It is not reasonable to deduce from the first two statements that 'improvement in listening skills follows from not trying to pay attention to every word'. In acting (as we do) on this illogical deduction, we confuse goals and methodology: we require learners to simulate the goal of native listener behaviour instead of teaching learners how to acquire progressively native-like abilities in perception and understanding. We have made the mistake of allowing the goal to become the method: we should recognise that the skill of understanding without attending to every word is a goal to be reached, not a means of getting there.
Adopting the goal-as-method procedure conveniently allows us to ignore the fact that native speaker listeners have great advantages over non-natives particularly in terms of perceptual ability, it allows us to avoid grasping the nettle of fast speech. Activities which encourage bottom-up processing, which target learners perceptual abilities, have become taboo.
Suggestion 1: Research into L2 listening in the classroom
Fry(1) (personal communication) advises, where circumstances permit, allowing learners to control the tape-recorder so that they can work on, and re-hear, those passages of the recording that they have problems with. Fry's experience is with classes of adult learners of English: he divides the class up into small groups and, after having done the warm up phase and set the listening task, he gives each group a tape-recorder, and the tape, and leaves it to the group to control the tape-recorder. He reports being very surprised at what they found easy, and what they find difficult in listening.
My experience of working with learners with computer controlled access to recordings (reported in part in Cauldwell, 1996) is also one in which I learned a great deal about their powers and weaknesses in perception and understanding. It brought home to me the fact that their difficulties lay in what were for me 'surprising' places.
So there are two benefits to allowing learners to control of the tape recorder: they can focus on their own needs; and for the teachers it amounts to research into second language listening - teachers discover where gaps in understanding and perception lie.
Conclusion:10 min
Students give their feedback to the topic, where they should compare their experiments with the ideas of linguists.