Педагогические  науки

Сыдыман Т.Ж, Дарменова А.Е

Евразийский национальный университет

The importance of teaching listening

Language is a very important means of communication in daily human life.Human being uses language both in written and spoken forms to express their idea. As stated by Ramelan [1], language is an arbitrary system of speech sounds whichis used in interpersonal communication by an aggregation of human beings, and which rather exhaustively catalogs thing, process, and events in the human environments. English has become an international language. People of different countries speak English to communicate. English is a key, which opens the door to scientific and technological knowledge. The Indonesian government has chosen English as the first foreign language to be taught in the schools

Listening comprehension skill is related to speaking and writing skill. Listening skill on the foreign language learning is divided to two situation; those are direct and indirect situation. Direct situation is such as conversation directly, speech, songs and etc., and indirect situation is such as listening on conversation on the cassette. Nowadays, listening comprehension has improved. For example, new technology has supported for the skill such as cassette, VCD, video and etc that can improve listening comprehension skill. The most important element and fundamental for the interaction is the ability to understand what the speaker has said. In the daily life, we often meet listeners who cannot listen to their mother tongue and foreign language well; maybe it is caused by the lack of focus or concentration, or egocentrism.

LISTENING

Listening, as we know, is the skill of understanding spoken language. Listening is an essential skill, present in most of the activities we carry out throughout our lives, as Lindsay and Knight shows: 11 We listen to a wide variety of things, for example; what someone says during a conversation, face to face or on the telephone; announcements giving information, for example, at an airport or railway station; the weather forecast on the radio; a play on the radio; music; someone else’s conversation (eavesdropping); a lecture; professional advice, for example, at the doctor’s, in the bank; instructions, for example, on how to use a photocopier or other machinery; directions; a taped dialogue in class [2]

The aim of teaching listening comprehension is (or should be) to help learner of English cope with listening in real life, but there is a large variety of different types of listening in real life: (1) Listening to announcements in stations, airports, etc. (2) Listening to the radio, (3) Participating in a conversation face-to-face, (4) Watch TV, (5) Participating in a meeting, seminar or discussion, (6) Taking part in a lesson, (7) Participating in a telephone conversation, among others.

Listening is also important because it:

· Occupies a big chunk of the time we spend communicating in the language. Think about the times you spend listening to others speak or listening to songs, news, lectures, YouTube, etc. Recent advances in technology have served to raise the profile of the listening skill in language teaching.

· Provides input that can be very significant for second language acquisition in general and for the development of the speaking skill in particular.

· Promotes non-linear processing of language and encourages learners to develop "holistic" strategies to texts.[3]

Listening plays a critical role in the cognitive processes that shape output and produce improvement in oral proficiency. According to Rubin (1995), “For second language/foreign language learners, listening is the skill that makes the heaviest processing demands because learners must store information in short term memory at the same time as they are working to understand the information” (p. 8). Furthermore, she explained, “Whereas in reading learners can go over the text at leisure, they generally don’t have the opportunity to do so in listening” (p. 8).

As language teachers, we need to think of how we can incorporate listening into our teaching and provide opportunities both inside and outside the classroom for our students to be exposed to significant listening input. For learners, listening presents a challenge for a variety of reasons, among which are the following:

· Listening involves multiple modes: Listening involves the interpersonal and interpretive modes of communication. It requires the listener to assume either a participative role in face-to-face conversations, or a non-participative role in listening to other people speaks or present.

· Listening involves all varieties of language: In addition to listening to lectures and presentations in academic and formal settings, learners have also to partake or listen to exchanges that involve various levels of colloquialism.

· Listening involves "altered" and "reduced" language forms: In addition to dealing with the vocabulary and structures of the language, listeners have to learn to comprehend reduced forms of the language (e.g., I wanna go, Just a sec).

· Listening involves variable rates of delivery: Unlike a reading text that is at the learner's control, a listening text is constantly moving and at variable speeds that often cannot be controlled by the listener.[4,5]

Focusing on listening is one of the best investments you can make as language teacher, as it will help your students develop more confidence in their language ability. Listening is a challenging skill, yet, with constant practice, support, and encouragement, your students will develop both strategies and confidence.

There are major reasons for applying the listening-first approach. First, listening comprehension designs the blueprint for future acquisition of speaking. Second, emphasis on aural comprehension training and relaxation of the requirement for oral production in the initial phase of instruction fosters development of linguistic competence and produces better results than those obtained through intensive oral practice. I do realize that finding suitable listening materials and developing activities based on them is not an easy task and requires much time, energy, and creativity. The reward that I get when I see my students interacting with a text and enjoying the discoveries they make with each listen is what keeps me going. I encourage you to think collectively with your colleagues and program administrators to explore how you can utilize technology to provide your students with more opportunities to make listening an integral part of their overall learning of the language. 

REFERENCES

1. Anderson, A. & T. Lynch (1988) Listening. Oxford: OUP.

2. Brown, G. et al. (1984) Teaching Talk. Strategies for Production and Assessment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

3. Brown, H.D. (1994) Teaching by principles: An interactive approach to language

4. Brown, H. D. (2000). Principles of language learning and teaching (4th ed.). New York: Longman.

5. Bueno, A, D. Madrid and N. McLaren, (eds). (2006) TEFL in Secondary Education.Granada: Editorial Universidad de Granada.