The importance of listening skills in methodological research theoretical background of listening skill

2.3 A lesson plan for listen and do songs

Before you start teaching any song, ascertain that the classroom CD player is ready for use and that every student can hear equally well. If you are going to use handouts, distribute them to the students but tell them not to read the lyrics until after the first listening. If you are using a textbook, tell the students the page number. If you do not have a textbook or access to a photocopier, you may write the lyrics on the board or on a poster before you start.

Stage 1: Pre-teaching activities
According to Davies and Pearse (2000), this stage is useful to prepare the learners for what they are going to hear, just as we usually prepare for real-life situations. Important points to consider for this stage, mainly derived from my own teaching experience, are as follows:
• To get the students interested in the topic of the song and to warm them up, you can show a picture or other realia related to the song and ask the students what they think the song is about. Tolerate some native language use, as these are YLs and beginners.
• Next, read the title of the song aloud, and explain it through actions and visuals.
• Ask the students if they already know any words in English related to the title of the song. On the board, write any English words that the students mention.
• Finally, explain the unknown vocabulary from the song through actions and visuals. There are usually very colorful pictures in YLs’ books, and it is timesaving to make use of them.
Stage 2: While-teaching activities
This stage is useful to help the learners understand the text through activities. As pointed out earlier, one advantage of Listen and Do songs is that students are active as they are listening. However, do not expect your students to learn the song and the accompanying actions in the first listening. They will need to listen to the song a few times.
Stage 3: Post-teaching activities
This stage is generally accepted as the stage when the teacher moves on from listening practice to focus on other language skills such as reading, speaking, and writing. In this context, Listen and Do songs are suitable for competitions, games, and simple drama activities.
Developing listening skills is a fundamental component of any ESL/EFL curriculum for YLs, and songs are regarded as one of the most effective techniques to this end. Songs have a definite place in the YL classroom; they provide meaningful and enjoyable language practice, especially in fostering listening skills. The hope is that the more songs YLs experience, the better language learners they will become. The effectiveness and importance of songs increase when they are used in combination with TPR, which involves game-like movements. It is my hope that the sample lesson plan in this article will bring songs to the attention of teachers of English to YLs and rein - force the practice of using songs in ESL/EFL contexts. It is important that ESL/EFL teachers understand the reasons for using songs in the YL classes and understand teaching procedures. Then they will discover their own reasons for and ways of using songs effectively and mean - in fully in their respective teaching contexts.
The importance of this study is developing English listening skills to students from advanced level by the teaching material: videos. This strategy can be applied for teaching and learning in the English Language development skill area of the Foreign Language Department from beginner to advanced levels. There are benefits for the English teacher, students, and the English curriculum.
The benefit for teachers is using properly, videos in English as a Foreign Language classroom. First of all, videos are a supplementary tool for teaching listening that creates a center of attention to students. Videos stimulate students English listening skills. This way the teacher is using a variety of strategies, methods and techniques in the classroom to extend the students' attention. Listening strategies are techniques or activities that contribute directly to the comprehension and recall of listening input.
Listening strategies can be classified by how the listener processes the input, techniques are procedures or skills for carrying out or completing specific tasks, these can be classroom devices or activities: a method is a set of procedures that describe how to teach a language and a skill is a learned ability to perform something
Lastly, an effective listening advanced English class will be characterized by the following feature: the materials should be authentic similar to real life, or students should be eager to know what they are listening for. In the future, English teachers can help the students develop listening skills by providing various kinds of materials and activities in classroom.
Definitions of Terms Video: Video in language learning may mean the use of popular films on video to provide content, and the use of smaller pieces of broadcast materials such as short documentaries and television advertisements. It can refer to professionally produced tapes specifically written and designed for classroom instruction, as well as the use of news broadcasts to provide content and to teach specific features of authentic language. The video that can be used in the language classroom may be bought, or recorded from television. They can be films, cartoons documentaries news, weather. Interviews, games show, advertisements or commercials. These materials can be used for general course, listening practice, business English and so on.
Young Learners who are students in early age around six to twelve, Alkhamali stated that, Young Learners is a term used to describe children of pre-primary and primary school age. Young Learners are often more enthusiastic and lively learners, Cameron notes that, Young Learners are like to please their teachers rather than their friends, they will do any activities even when they do not understand the reason therefore they also interest more quickly and are less able to keep themselves motivated on tasks they find are difficult. That are make Young children is very unique and attractive than adults. Phillips said that, how Young Learners, learn a new language, and even the technique to teach obviously depends on their developmental stage, Young Learners have their own responds to learn a new language, they react to foreign language according to what they can do with it, rather than treating it as an intellectual game or abstract system.
Based on the data gotten, since the nature of the children like to play and have fun, it is possible for the teachers to teach the students through the fun activity. One form of fun activities that the students know and familiar is video, and the simple form of video is movie. Through movie video and the fun activity make the students learn the language unconsciously, and in a fun way. Through video, the students can enhance their language skills such as listening, speaking and writing. These three skills are put in order, since the first skills that the students learn is listening to the voice on video , and after that the students learn to speak or pronounce the word on video, the last thing, the students learn to write the simple story from video. The activity is not only lead to the fun activity of the students but also the skills’ development of the students. So, it can be concluded that teaching listening using video is considered as an alternative media used to improve the students’ listening comprehension.

INTEGRATING PHONOLOGY IN LANGUAGE SKILLS CLASSES

Phonology is science that studies sounds in particular language. This area of language is very important, particularly for EFL teachers because many of them mispronounced the English words and planted them on the students. For example, the word “great” which is supposed to be pronounced /greit/ is pronounced /grit/, the word ‘answer’ which is supposed to be pronounced /ænsə/ pronounced / ænswə /. Therefore, in pronouncing English words, EFL teachers must be familiar with places of articulation in English such as: stop, fricative, affricative, nasal, and liquid. Moreover, the EFL teacher must know the manner of articulation as well such as: glide, labial, labiodental, interdental, alveolar, velar, and glottal. Moreover, since 1888, an effort has been made to create a universal system for transcribing the sound of speech to help the linguists transcribing languages consistently and accurately. This system is famously known as The International Phonetic Alphabet.

By knowing these features, teacher will be able to minimize the errors in pronouncing English words. Further, phonology is not always about pronouncing English correctly but it also covers stress, pitch and intonation. Stress, pitch, and intonation in English give different color to the words uttered. For instance, in conversation, to form question, it is not necessarily required in form of question. For instance “so, you are leaving?” I think introducing pitch, stress, and intonation to the students are very important because it will make their English language skill particularly speaking skill more fluently and more natural. However, in determining the stress, teachers should be careful since it will change the class of the word or it will even change the meaning of the word. For instance, the word /record/ for noun and /record/ for verb are both pronounced differently. In accordance with this statement, in Contemporary Linguistics an Introduction edited by William O’ Grady and John Archibald stated that intonation is very often serve to transfer a wide-ranging meaningful information.

All in all, learning phonology will contribute a great deal of help for ESL teachers, for phonology deals with element of sounds. This element of sounds includes phonetics, place of articulation, manner of articulation, stress, pitch, and intonation. Furthermore, learning phonology will help teacher minimizing errors in pronouncing and articulating English

All in all, the teaching of phonology has witnessed a considerable amount of changes in both approaches and techniques. Since the rise of traditional approaches to language teaching, teaching pronunciation has gained momentum. However, with the increased focus on the learner in learner-centered approaches and with the continuing emphasis on the communicative aspect of language teaching, teachers have sought new ways of incorporating pronunciation with other language skills. This has resulted in pronunciation being linked mainly to speaking and listening. Nevertheless, one should not deny the role of phonetics and phonology in the teaching of pronunciation since the more students are aware of the precepts and underpinnings of these branches of study, the more they will become aware of the idiosyncrasies of the target language and the more they are likely to achieve a native-like pronunciation.

CONCLUSION

Teaching English is not an easy process , it demands strength a lot from teachers for that reason teachers should use different activities in order to explain lessons easly.Because using different kinds of activities can improve productivity of lesson and also it can atract students attractions as a result of this teacher can achieve his or her goals without difficulties.

Regarding to listening activities ,nowadays we can find different kind of them because of modern technology and researchs of skillful teachers .For that reason now,teachers can use them while teaching process .In order to increase productivity of listening activities they are divided into three parts "PRE- WHILE- POST" because by the help of this we can teach lesson step by step and we can control process.And every activity is used according to lesson rules and we can avoid confusing by this way.And als we can not imagine nearly all part of english without "PHONOLOGY" because by the help of this we learn how to pronounce words.It is very useful to listening an speaking.Both of them are very important in learnig english process.For that reason we should give a big pay attention teaching Phonology in language classes because communication depends on it If we can not pronunce some words while communicting we can not explain our thoughts and ideas to others .Because of this teachers should take into consideration importance of Phonology in English.

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