Филологические науки / 5.Методы и приемы контроля уровня владения иностранным языком

Seimahanova S. D.

English teacher of school gymnasium No. 49, Taraz, Kazakhstan

Listening comprehension in teaching English language

The major reason for teaching listening is that it helps students to acquire language subconsciously even if teachers do not draw attention to its special features. Exposure to language is a fundamental requirement for anyone wanting to learn it. Listening to appropriate tapes provides such exposure and students get vital information not only about grammar and vocabulary but also about pronunciation, rhythm, intonation, pitch and stress.

Listening comprehension is divided into four main sections:

I. Attentive listening

II. Intensive listening

III. Selective listening

IV. Interactive listening

Each section helps students develop a range of skills and strategies.

Most interactive listening situations are in the form of discussions and games. Two important points need to be kept in mind. First, these activities form the basis of oral work, where the emphasis is on getting the learners to use language for self-expression. It should not be forgotten, however, that listening is an important aspect of these activities. The learners have to listen in order to participate. Secondly, although these activities are normally done in groups, in order to give the students themselves as many opportunities as possible to use language, we should also look for suitable opportunities to interact with the class as a whole, through conversation, discussion and games. This must be regarded as a significant component of the listening comprehension programme.

Discussion-type activities. These provide good listening practice because they get students to listen to one another, especially if the discussion is geared toward making a decision of some kind. For such activities, the student have to listen to one another in order to participate.

Predictive listening. For this activity a text is read aloud sentence-by-sentence. The students are asked to interpret the sentence and to predict what they think will follow. As the text builds up, they can revise their interpretations. Although this is a contrived activity, it encourages very careful listening both to the text itself and to the various interpretations suggested.

Communication games. Many communication games provide excellent practice. For example, describe and draw where the listeners, whose task is to draw the picture, being described, interact with the speaker in order to elicit more information it is based on the jigsaw principle. In this case, however, the information is divided up visually among the participants, who have to talk and ask questions in order to build up the complete story. Games, which involve the evaluation of a player’s performance, such as, Use it, also provide purposeful listening practice.

Students get better at listening the more they do it. Listening is a skill and any help we can give students in performing that skill will help them to be better listeners.

Jigsaw listening. As its name implies, the basic mechanism underlying this activity is that the information needed to complete a task (such as attending a meeting) has been shared out between 3-4 groups in the class. Each group listens to its own piece of recorded material and notes down on a worksheet the information available. The groups then combine to pool their information.

Ambiguous conversations. The students hear a short conversation (or an extract from a long conversation), which provides very few clues as to what the speakers are talking about. The students themselves have to decide who the speakers are, where they are, what they are talking about, and, possibly, what will happen next. This type of listening then, leads on naturally to discussion (and, if desired, writing).

In order to define listening, we must outline the main component skills in listening. In terms of the necessary components, we can list the following:

- discrimination between sounds.

- recognizing words.

- identifying grammatical groupings of words.

- identifying ‘pragmatic units’ - expressions and sets of utterance which function as whole units to create meaning.

- connecting linguistic cues to paralinguistic cues (intonation and stress) and to nonlinguistic cues (gestures and relevant objects in the situation) in order to construct meaning.

- using background knowledge (what we already know about the content and the form) and context (what has already been said) to predict and then to confirm meaning.

- recalling important words and ideas.

Successful listening involves an integration of these component skills. In this sense, listening is a coordination of the component skills, not the individual skills themselves. This integration of these perception skills, analysis skills, and synthesis skills is what we call a person’s listening ability. In showing a considerable variety of listening activities, we have explored some of the many ways to help students acquire the confidence to use their skills for self-expression in language situations.

Bibliography:

1. Brown, Gillian, Listening to Spoken English, Second Edition. - Longman, 1990. - 178p.

2. Brown, Gillian, and Yule, George, Teaching the Spoken Language. - Cambridge University Press, 1992. - 162p.

3. Byrne, Donn, Teaching Oral English, New Edition. - Longman, 1997. - 140p.

4. Harmer, Jeremy, How to Teach English. - Longman, 1991. - 285p.

5. Harmer, Jeremy, The Practice of English Language Teaching, New Edition. - Longman, 1991. – 296 p.

6. Heaton, J. B., Writing English Language Tests, New Edition. - Longman, 1991. - 115 p.