Plan: introduction main part theoretical bases of teaching listening types of listening activities

THEORETICAL BASES OF TEACHING LISTENING.

Listening or auding as comprehension is the traditional way of thinking about the nature of listening. Indeed, in most methodology manuals listening and listening comprehension are synonymous. This view of listening is based on the assumption that the main function of listening in second language learning is to facilitate understanding of spoken discourse. We will examine this view of listening in some detail before considering a complementary view of listening – listening as acquisition. This latter view of listening considers how listening can provide input that triggers the further development of second-language proficiency.

Listening or auding comprehension is defined as an active and complex process which requires learners to receive sounds, attend to relevant sounds, assign meaning,and store the message for later use.According to Saricoban, listening is the ability to identify and understand what others are saying.Bohlken also defineslistening as "the process of receiving, constructing meaning from, and responding to spoken language and/or nonverbals".
Moreover, Beatty indicates that listening is an intellectual as well as a moral skill where the good listener pays an adequate amount of attention to comprehend the message in order to interact effectively with the speaker.
In addition, Devito [2004, p. 8] views listening as an active process of receiving, understanding, remembering, evaluating and responding to communicative discourse.
Thus, listening can be operationally defined in the present study as an active, complex and intellectual process in which learners receive sounds, construct meanings, and respond to the verbal as well as nonverbal messages.
The importance of listening in language learning has changed over the past years. Listening used to be overlooked and educators supposed that listening abilities would be acquired during the grammar, vocabulary and pronunciation practice. This was quite surprising as abilities to listen play an equal role as abilities to speak in successful communication.
There are a lot of reasons why educators are now focused on the ability to understand and contribute to communication. Firstly, pupils at basic schools are encouraged to develop good listening abilities in their mother tongue so that they can be successful in everyday communication. Secondly, students have to develop effective listening strategies that will enable them to learn another language.
Underwood points out that listening is an activity of paying attention to the speaker and subsequent attempt to understand what we hear. Even though listening may be seen as a passive process it is not true because we as listeners have to concentrate on the message to be able to decode it. Underwood argues that hearing can be thought of as a passive condition, listening is always an active process.
There are three main stages involved in the auditory process. During the first stage sounds are structured into meaningful units. The process of organising the sounds into the units is based on learner’s previous knowledge about the language. During the second stage we work on the new information. This means that we compare and contrast words or phrases we heard with already known information. The last step includes transmitting the newly acquired information into the long term memory so that we can use this information later.
The most children come to school armed with only one way to learn listening. Almost all of us were born doing it. Indeed , for the first years of formal education , listening is an integral part of teaching . But something happens around first and second grade, when students learn to read. Slowly the read aloud books and story time are phased out, replased instead by silent reading. Once a student
learns to read , there is no time on improving listening and yet reaserch shows that listening comprehension is closely tied to reading comprehension through 8th grade and beyond. Our education system needs to do better.
Listening is the language modality that is used most frequently. It has been estimated that adults spend almost half their communication time listening, and students may receive as much as 90% of their in-school information through listening to instructors and to one another. Often, however, language learners do not recognize the level of effort that goes into developing listening ability.
Far from passively receiving and recording aural input, listeners actively involve themselves in the interpretation of what they hear, bringing their own background knowledge and linguistic knowledge to bear on the information contained in the aural text. Not all listening is the same; casual greetings, for example, require a different sort of listening capability than do academic lectures. Language learning requires intentional listening that employs strategies for identifying sounds and making meaning from them.
The importance of listening in language learning is worth considering since when you do not listen you will never learn anything new.
To understand the nature of listening processes, we need to consider some of the characteristics of spoken discourse and the special problems they pose for listeners. Spoken discourse has very different characteristics from written discourse, and these differences can add a number of dimensions to our understanding of how we process speech. For example, spoken discourse is usually instantaneous. The listener must process it "online" and there is often no chance to listen to it again. Often, spoken discourse strikes the second-language listener as being very fast, although speech rates vary considerably. Radio monologs may contain 160 words per minute, while conversation can consist of up to 220 words per minute. The impression of faster or slower speech generally results from the amount of intraclausal pausing that speakers make use of. Unlike written discourse, spoken discourse is usually unplanned and often reflects the processes of construction such as hesitations, reduced forms, fillers, and repeats. Spoken discourse has also been described as having a linear structure, compared to a hierarchical structure for written discourse. Whereas the unit of organization of written discourse is the sentence, spoken language is usually delivered one clause at a time, and longer utterances in conversation generally consist of several coordinated clauses. Most of the clauses used are simple conjuncts or adjuncts. Also, spoken texts are often context-dependent and personal, assuming shared background knowledge. Lastly, spoken texts may be spoken with many different accents, from standard or non-standard, regional, non-native, and so on [3, p. 48].
Listening involves a sender (a person, radio, and television), a message, and a receiver (the listener). Listeners often must process messages as they come, even if they are still processing what they have just heard, without backtracking or looking ahead. In addition, listeners must cope with the sender's choice of vocabulary, structure, and rate of delivery. The complexity of the listening process is magnified in second language contexts, where the receiver also has incomplete control of the language.
In real situations we rarely listen to somebody without any expectations what we are going to hear. This means that we usually have preconceived idea of the content [Ur 1984: 3] and these ideas are based on our knowledge about the heard information. These expectations are usually connected with the purpose of listening e.g. if we want to know what the time is we have to ask somebody. According to Rogova the heard information which corresponds with the listener’s expectations and needs is more likely to be correctly apprehended and understood than the information that is not relevant or useful. That is why it is so important to provide the learners with some information about the content before listening [ ].
In almost all real-life situations listeners are supposed to give an immediate response to what they just heard. To respond to the information they can use either verbal or nonverbal ways of expressing their opinions. But this is not a caseof classroom recordings since they consist of long parts of speech and the response to them is demanded at the end rather than between individual parts and Ur argues that listening tasks should consist of short parts demanding immediate answer.
In everyday situations there are a great number of reasons for listening. Brown and Yule divided the purposes into two main categories interactional and transactional. Interactional purpose convey social reasons of communication such as chatting at a party whereas transactional is used to express exchange of information such as to follow instruction (Hedge). Galvin claims that there are five main reasons for listening such as to engage in social
rituals; to exchange information; to enjoy yourself; to share feelings and to exertcontrol [Hedge 2000: 243]. And according to Underwood teachers should prepare their students for these situations:

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  Attending a lesson or a lecture. The aim of this activity is to understand the main concept and to be able to distinguish the main information.
  
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  Listening to announcements, news and weather forecast. In this situation listener’s objective is to get relevant information.
  
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  Listening to live situation in which one takes no part. This type of situation is usually connected with eavesdropping. The person listening to the conversation is usually unaware of the context so that he or she cannot interfere into the conversation.
  
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  Listening to or watching plays, watching TV or listening to a radio for pleasure.
  

The aim of this activity is to entertain oneself.

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  Listening to someone giving a speech. The listener is often interested in views and attitudes of the speaker.
  

Following the instructions. The listener’s objective is to accomplish the task successfully.
Since it is difficult to provide listening that contains natural speech and is highly interesting I consider this list of purposes of individual listening as a support for teachers when they are choosing the listening text for their student.