Alla Kyrda, PhD in Education

National Aviation University (Ukraine)

Developing Listening Comprehension Skills for Advanced Level Students

The essence of developing listening comprehension skills for students of advanced level is to make them able not only to hear and recognize words, patterns, sentence structures but also understand different accents, cope with proper names and abbreviations, understand colloquial vocabulary, cope with fast rate of verbal communication, compete background noise, use visual and context clues, activate cultural knowledge of the target language and predict.

It is a challenging and difficult but attainable task.

Listening is a process of perception and comprehension of speech, mental and mnemic activity according to Ukrainian and Russian scholars, educators and translators I.Guez, V.Kashyrskyi, T.Kuzmichova, A.Luria, A.Starkov, S.Shatilov [1, 3].

In teaching listening comprehension skills for advanced level students the following general guidelines can be proposed.

First of all, the audio recordings have to correspond to different situations the learners are required to listen to in “real life”: the news on the television and radio, informal chats and formal spoken discussions, talks on the phones and in a public place, songs and films, lectures and seminars [4].

Secondly, the themes of the listening material need to relate to the professional interests of learners. For example, they are “Current political issues”, “Modern global and regional economic problems”, “Global financial crisis”, etc. for future international experts.

Thirdly, it is important the use of up-to-date material. It motivates learners if the information is new, interesting, corresponds to their spiritual, intellectual, cultural demands and includes new, valuable data.

After that, the quantity of information (the number of words in an audio/video fragment) should be optimal. They recommend up to 2000 signs and 12-13 unfamiliar lexical items [2].

More over, the information needs to be accessible for students taking into account their language competence. It requires the use of graded materials.

Gradually, it moves to the use of authentic material – radio or television programs designed for professionals of a certain area. Such stations as the BBC, Euronews, CNN, VOA, NPR, RCI, WRN are the likely sources of audio materials for guided and independent practicing.

For training advanced level students or postgraduate learners it is recommended to chose “problematic” samples: audio recordings with fast rate of speech, emotional voting, background noise, a strong accent (for instance, pronunciation of native speakers with so called “standard” accents like North American or British as well as so called “non-standard” versions or the English spoken by French, Spaniard or other non-native speakers), use of slang or professional jargon. Special attention is to be attracted to precise translation of proper names: place-names, surnames, names of organizations, well-known and widely-used abbreviations, similar or international words.

It is important to use the Internet materials for teaching a foreign language communication, reading, writing and listening comprehension in particular. More over, pre-listening, while-listening and post-listening graded and task oriented exercises are suggested to facilitate understanding, engage learners’ interest and provide a purpose for listening.

For example, listen to the information on the podcast of the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office (http://podcast.ulcc.ac.uk/accounts/Foreign-Office/wilton-park/cyber_security) “Dialogues on cyber-security” from a conference in Wilton Park and prepare your answers to the following questions:

1) What countries are represented at the conference?

2) What issues of cyber-security are discussed by the participants?

3) What threats from cyber-attacks actually exist for state defense, security sector, communication and transport area?

4) What potential threats are there for the commercial world: banks, associations of lawyers?

5) What ways of prevention are proposed?

6) What diplomatic and force responses are suggested?

7) What definitions of such terminology as “cyber-threat”, “cyber-attack”, “cyber-espionage”, “cyber-terrorism” are given?

8) What amendments in the legislation are offered to control the phenomena and their consequences at the international and domestic level?

Developing listening comprehension skills for advanced level students is a demanding process, which involves not only recognizing lexical items and grammatical structures but also understanding different accents and types of discourse, coping with proper names and abbreviations, activating background knowledge, satisfying professional needs and personal interests of learners.

Literature:

1. Мещанова Н.Ф. Методика обучения иностранным языкам. Языковая педагогика в схемах и таблицах. Тема: Методика обучения аудированию // Методические тетради. – М.: Еврошкола, 2004.

2. Федорова І.А. Критерії відбору матеріалів Інтернет-ресурсів для навчання англомовного ділового повідомлення / І.А. Федорова // Вісник Чернігівського державного педагогічного університету. – 2009. – Випуск 70. – С. 207-211.

3. Kashyrskyi V. Listening Comprehension Skills Development and Sources of Audio Materials / V. Kashyrskyi // Communication in the Global Age: Celebrating Ten Years of Development and Success: conference abstracts. – Львів: ПП «Марусич», 2005. – С. 226-227.

4. Shelton, Scott. Teaching Listening to Advanced Learners: Problems and Solutions // www.developingteachers.com/articles.../list1_scott.htm