Педагогические науки/ 5.Современные методы преподавания

Popkova Y.V.

East-Kazakhstan state technical university, Kazakhstan

SOME MODERN ASPECTS IN TEACHING UNIVERSITY STUSENTS LISTENING AND SPEAKING ACTIVITIES

In teaching EFL/ESL one should possess some fundamental guidelines which will make teaching more successful and satisfying for both students, and teachers.

Among all language skills courses in listening and speaking skills have a prominent place in language teaching today. Our understanding of the nature of listening and speaking has undergone considerable changes in recent years. The teaching listening has attracted a greater interest in recent years than it did in the past.

The notion of English as an international language has also prompted a revision of the notion of communicative competence to include the notion of intercultural competence. We should know what applied linguistics research and theory says about the nature of listening and speaking skills, and what implications for classroom teaching our methodology proposes. Listening 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.

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. Spoken discourse has also been described as having a linear structure, compared to a hierarchical structure for written discourse.

Two different kinds of processes are involved in understanding spoken discourse. These are often referred to as bottom-up and top-down processing.

Bottom-up processing refers to using the incoming input as the basis for understanding the message. Comprehension is viewed as a process of decoding.

In teaching bottom-up processing learners need a large vocabulary and a good working knowledge of sentence structure to process texts bottom-up. Exercises that develop bottom-up processing help the learner to do such things as the following:

· Retain input while it is being processed

· Recognize word and clause divisions

· Recognize key words

· Recognize key transitions in a discourse

· Recognize grammatical relationships between key elements in sentences

· Use stress and intonation to identify word and sentence functions

Traditional listening focus primarily on bottom-up processing, with exercises such as dictation, cloze listening, multiple-choice questions after a text. They assume that everything the listener needs to understand is contained in the input.

These example tasks for bottom-up listening skills to do the following things:

· Identify the referents of pronouns in an utterance

· Recognize the time reference of an utterance

· Distinguish between positive and negative statements

· Recognize the order in which words occurred in an utterance

· Identify sequence markers

· Identify key words that occurred in a spoken text

· Identify which modal verbs occurred in a spoken text

Here are some examples of listening tasks that develop bottom-up processing:

1)Listening: Listen and complete the specification chart.

Audio-text is the following:

“This monster is one of the biggest tunnel drills in the world. It’s the MB471/316 Tunnel Drill, and it costs more than thirty-one million dollars. It’s twenty-four point three metres in diameter across the cutter face. It weighs two thousand tons and moves at a massive speed of three metres pr hour. It needs at least two hundred and thirty workers to operate and maintain it.”

MB471/316 Tunnel Drill Specifications

Length

Diameter

Speed

Manpower needed

Cost

2)Listening: Anna is talking about her CV. Fill in the gaps. “From 2003 until 2005, I(1)__ at Comet Electronics as a technician. I (2)____ Comet in 2005 and (3) ___a full-time student at Thames Valley University in September 2005. From 2005 to 2006, I (4) _____audio electronics at Thames Valley. In 2006, I (5) ___my Diploma in Audio Technology. Then in September 2006, I (6) ___work as an audio maintenance technician at Omega studios.”

Audio-text is the following: “From 2003 until 2005, I worked at Comet Electronics as a technician. I left Comet in 2005 and became a full-time student at Thames Valley University in September 2005. From 2005 to 2006, I studied audio electronics at Thames Valley. In 2006, I received my Diploma in Audio Technology. Then in September 2006, I started work as an audio maintenance technician at Omega studios.”

Top-down processing, on the other hand, refers to the use of background knowledge in understanding the meaning of a message. Whereas bottom-up processing goes from language to meaning, top-down processing goes from meaning to language. The background knowledge required for top-down processing may be previous knowledge about the topic of discourse, situational or contextual knowledge. Primarily top-down processing should be taught because it develops the learner’s ability to do the following:

· Use key words to construct the schema of a discourse

· Infer the setting for a text

· Infer the role of the participants and their goals

· Infer causes or effects

· Infer unstated details of a situation

· Anticipate questions related to the topic or situation

The following activities develop top-down listening skills are as follows:

· Students generate a set of questions they expect to hear about a topic, then listen to see if they are answered.

· Students generate a list of things they already know about a topic and things they would like to learn more about, then listen and compare.

· Students read one speaker’s part in a conversation, predict the other speaker’s part, then listen and compare.

· Students read a list of key points to be covered in a talk, then listen to see which ones are mentioned.

· Students listen to part of a story, complete the story ending, then listen and compare endings.

· Students read news headlines, guess what happened, then listen to the full news items and compare.

In real-world listening, both bottom-up and top-down processing generally occur together. The extent to which one or the other dominates depends on the listener’s familiarity with the topic and content of a text, the density of information in a text, the text type, and the listener’s purpose in listening.

A typical lesson in current teaching materials involves a three-part sequence consisting of pre-listening, while-listening, and post-listening and contains activities that link bottom-up and top-down listening (Field, 1998). The pre-listening phase prepares students for both top-down and bottom-up processing through activities involving activating prior knowledge, making predictions, and reviewing key vocabulary. The while-listening phase focuses on comprehension through exercises that require selective listening, gist listening, sequencing, etc. The post-listening typically involves a response to comprehension and may require students to give opinions about a topic. However, it can also include a bottom-up focus if the teacher and the listeners examine the texts or parts of the text in detail.

Successful listening can also be looked at in terms of the strategies the listener uses when listening. Does the learner focus mainly on the content of a text, or does he also consider how to listen? A focus on how to listen raises the issues of listening strategies. They can be the ways in which a learner approaches and manages a task, and listeners can be taught effective ways of approaching and managing their listening. These activities seek active listeners in the process of listening.

We believe that in contexts where comprehension and acquisition are the goals of a listening course, a two-part strategy is appropriate in classroom teaching and instructional materials, namely:

Phase 1: Listening as comprehension

Phase 2: Listening as acquisition

The listening texts are now used as the basis for speaking activities, making use of noticing activities and restructuring activities.Linking listening tasks to speaking tasks, provide opportunities for students to notice how language is used in different communicative contexts.

Bibliography

1. Jack C. Richards (2008). Teaching Listening and Speaking. From Theory to Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

2. Mark Ibbotson Series Editor: Jeremy Day (2008). Cambridge English for Engineering. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

3. Celia Bingham (2008). Technical English. 2 course Book. Teacher’s Book. Pearson Education Limited.

4. Felixa Eskey (2005). Tech Talk.Better English through Reading in Science and Technology. The University of Michigan: The University of Michigan Press

5. Brown, Gillian, and George Yule (1983). Teaching the Spoken Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

6. Дмитренко Т.А. (2009). Методика преподавания английского языка в вузе. Москва: Московский экономико-лингвистический институт.