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Политова Кар

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Политова Карина 214.1 группа

Доклад на тему: «Developing listening skills as one of the objectives in teaching/learning foreign languages. Listening comprehension as a means in developing communicative competence»

In real communication, we have to listen a lot, and how accurately and fully we perceive the information received can determine our subsequent actions. Teaching students to understand sounding speech is one of the most important tasks of education.

There are situations in which we encounter speech activity. For example, various ads, radio and television news, various instructions and assignments, lectures, stories of interlocutors, performances of actors, interlocutor on a telephone conversation, etc.

Often, in addition to listening to speech, we perform other actions: we observe, speak, write, etc., but for the most part, in order to function adequately in a particular situation, it is necessary to understand what you hear.

It is almost impossible to form only one speech or language skill in a lesson. Working with audio texts, we work out lexical, grammatical, phonetic skills. Audio texts provide information for discussion, which in turn suggests further development of speaking or writing skills. In this case, listening is a learning tool. It is not easy to draw a clear line here. Even the term "speaking" initially implies both listening skills and speaking skills. Dialogue as a form of oral communication is impossible without well-formedlistening and speaking skills.

The practical experience of teaching a foreign language, the practice of interpreting and simply communicating in a foreign language convinces that listening is one of the most difficult types of speech activity. First, it is characterized by one-time presentation. Therefore, one must learn to understand the text from the first presentation, since in real situations of communication, repetitions are often simply excluded. Secondly, we are not able to change anything, we cannot adapt the speaker's speech to our level of understanding. Each person has his own style, sometimes it is too scientific, and sometimes it is too emotional, full of idioms and figurative expressions, which are far from clear to everyone. Thirdly, there are a number of objective difficulties that prevent understanding speech the first time.

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Difficulties in auding and ways of preventing them in a listening task. 

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Difficulties in auding and ways of preventing them in a listening task. 

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Many students struggle with listening comprehension assessments because they don’t remember the information they may have just listened to. There are many reasons that a student might have difficulty remembering something that they just listened to. They might have trouble because the clip is longer than they’re used to tracking, the student might be diagnosed with ADHD or an auditory processing difficulty, or they might have an underlying learning disorder.

For the most part, all these reasons come down to a single issue: lack of focus.

1. Start short and work your way to longer clips.

Listening comprehension requires a fair bit of stamina, but stamina is not built overnight. If students are struggling with longer audio clips, the natural response is to shorten them. Teachers could break longer clips into various pieces, or, alternatively, teachers could start with smaller clips and work their way up to longer ones.

2. Teach students active listening skills.

Teachers know when a student has parents who encourage active listening skills at home. They always seem to get directions on the first try, and they seem to be listening to everything that’s going on in the classroom.

Many students, though, haven’t had the reinforcement at home to get used to the assortment of actions and habits that make up active listening. Conditions like ADHD and auditory processing disorders can also disrupt students’ focus, causing them to miss important information or get distracted by thoughts, movements, or their environment.

The time spent teaching and practicing active listening strategies should never be denounced or overlooked. The time spent to teach and practice active listening strategies always pays dividends in increased listening comprehension.

3. Incorporate graphic organizers.

Teachers tend to assume that notetaking is a natural activity, but it’s another that needs some focused instructional attention in the classroom.

The benefit of graphic organizers is twofold: organizers can support students in choosing which information to write to be able to remember what was said, and they help students illustrate the relationships between the various story elements.

Teachers can begin by offering pre-designed graphic organizers that students can fill in as they listen. But taking time to help students analyze why a particular graphic organizer helps students understand a particular story builds students’ capacity to choose organizers that suit what they are listening to independently.

Speaker accent and rate of speed

One of the biggest challenges to overcome, especially for ELLs, is understanding the speaker’s delivery. A radio broadcast journalist from Atlanta is going to pronounce many words differently than a journalist from Nigeria, and this can often provide challenges for students who are still developing phonemic awareness in English.

1. Choose audio clips with a neutral American accent or an accent the students are used to.

Sometimes the best teaching strategies consist of choosing materials wisely. If students are new to a language or listening to comprehend, strong regional or foreign accents can throw them for a loop. Begin where they are and with what they already know.

As they listen to texts more and more often, begin slowly incorporating other voices.

Using class discussion or written reflections, the teacher can then guide students to an understanding of:

Second-language speakers and accents

How various languages are similar and different

Why people speak the same language differently in different parts of the country

Empathy and respect for difference

Students must be aware that people will speak differently in different places, and it helps to get them to think about the idea that everyone has an accent. Theirs is just very common for them to hear. A global education helps build empathy and understanding for others, showing students that “we don’t exist in isolation” and that our way is only one way.

2. Use audio clips with built-in transcripts and speed controls.

When students struggle to keep up with a speaker, reinforcing the listening with closed captions or a transcript can support listeners when necessary.

Teachers need to understand their state and district tests to know whether students will be allowed the support of textual reinforcement of what they hear. However, even if students must listen without visual support on the exam, it is perfectly appropriate to build listening capacity with transcripts and slowly remove them through the year (or as appropriate).

Audio speed control can also slow down (or speed up) the audio clip for better listening comprehension, depending on the student or class. If a moderately proficient ESL student can slow down the text to increase processing time, they stand a far better chance of being successful on the assessment.

Listenwise offers teachers high-quality audio with assessments already created for teachers. It includes transcripts and listening speed controls to customize the experience for each student.

Limited listener vocabulary

For students with limited background knowledge and vocabulary, listening to a news story might be especially frustrating if they can’t understand most of the individual words used to relate events.

Young learners may not feel any shyness asking about words or ideas they don’t know about. However, older students often feel shame and embarrassment when they don’t know something that the students around them do.

1. Frontload challenging (and not-so-challenging) vocabulary.

The surest way to increase vocabulary is to provide words to look for before listening. But knowing what words to choose requires a solid understanding of their own students.

A general procedure for this kind of vocabulary building might look like this:

Give students a list of words with which the teacher thinks most students are unfamiliar.

Explain them before listening.

Have students raise their hands when they hear a word used.

Listen again, and have students use a thumbs up or down signal to indicate whether they understand the words when they occur in the clip.

Review troubling vocabulary afterward.

However, students who have more difficulties may benefit from common words being thrown into that vocabulary list. Teachers can have a specific student in mind when choosing vocabulary for the whole class–perhaps an ELL student, a student who has had an interrupted education, or even a student who was artificially promoted and is struggling to keep up with the class.

It doesn’t require them to speak or call out attention to themselves when they don’t know the words, but they learn them all the same.

2. Use leveled audio texts.

For students with listening comprehension difficulties, the teacher could search for a closely related audio text with a lower level of complexity for that individual student. She could also provide a supplemental clip to provide individual students with essential background knowledge and vocabulary to participate more easily with the class.

Listenwise’s leveled audio assignments make it so easy to target individual learner needs that teachers can be assured that they’re not leaving students behind.

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Different types of listening comprehension exercises.

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Different types of listening comprehension exercises.

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Teaching students to understand spoken language is one of the most important learning goals. In real communication, one has to deal with listening as a completely independent type of speech activity.

Bim Inessa Lvovna – Doctor of Pedagogical Sciences, professor, scientist in the field of theory and methodology of teaching foreign languages. Inessa Lvovna became the author of more than one generation of school textbooks on the German language. She developed the methodological foundations of the methodology of teaching a foreign language as a science.

Bim I.L. distinguished the following three types of listening:
• Listening for gist (listening to authentic functional texts in order to determine what they are talking about);
• Listening for specific information (the speech of the teacher and fellow students, which does not contain unfamiliar phenomena);
• Listening for details (e.g. listening to a weather announcement to find out if it's going to rain)
In accordance with the requirements of the State Educational Standard, the development of these types of listening is the purpose of teaching this type of speech activity in secondary school.

1. Listening for gist. This type of listening is the simplest and "involves processing the semantic information of the sounding text in order to separate the new from the known, the essential from the unimportant, to fix the most important information in memory. It is necessary to be able to determine the genre and theme of the text, highlight the main idea of the message, keywords and main points of content, distinguish essential information from non-essential, omit minor details, fix attention on the main problem of the text and not be distracted by digressions, as well as ignore difficulties that do not affect the understanding of the main meaning text.
Listening for gist is usually a task for the first listening. It assumes students' understanding of audio in general. As a rule, in this type of assignment, we ask students to hear specific information necessary to understand the general meaning. Students don't have to understand every word. The purpose of the task is to check the predictions of the students at the expense of the content of the audio fragment, as well as to clarify some common points.

2. Listening for specific information (scanning). With this type of listening, an accurate understanding of all the information contained in the text is assumed. Therefore, this type of listening is more difficult than the previous one. It requires high concentration of attention, good development of psychological mechanisms of listening, as well as the ability to actively seek attention. For this type of listening, it is important to be able to understand the structure of the text, to trace the development of the subject of the message, while highlighting not only the main information, but also the secondary.
Listening for specific information – usually this is a task for the second listening, sometimes it happens for the first. The purpose of this type of task is to teach students to hear actual very specific information in audio (date, name, flight number, place name, quantity of something, etc.). When students have such a goal, it is important to familiarize them with the task in advance and make sure that they understand what they need to hear. To perform this type of task, again, you do not need to understand every word in the audio fragment and pay attention to the details. This type of assignment helps students learn how to choose the main thing from the audio, focus on the actual information.

3. Listening for details. The task of this type of listening is to isolate the necessary or interesting information in the speech stream, ignoring unnecessary. Such information can be important arguments, details, keywords, examples or specific data: dates, numbers, proper names and geographical names. The specificity of this type of listening is the ability to carry out information search in accordance with the task.
Listening for details is usually the last stage of working with listening. Students listen to the audio in more detail, choosing specific information from the text. The difference from the previous type of listening is that in this case we listen to understand the details at the level of sentences, and in the previous case – at the level of understanding words, numbers, etc. Usually these are T/F tasks, answers to a list of questions.

(Salienko Daria, Shakova Anastasia)

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Stages of work with an audiotext. Objectives, content and peculiarities of each stage (Г. В. Рогова, Соловова Е. Н.,  western FLT)

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Stages of work with an audiotext. Objectives, content and peculiarities of each stage (Г. В. Рогова, Соловова Е. Н.,  western FLT)

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The pre-text stage. The preliminary instruction creates a motivational and organizational attitude, mobilizes for active work. It includes the formulation of the task, explains the ways of its implementation, orients in difficulties, sometimes indicates the forms of verification of understanding. The degree of motivation of the listeners depends on the primary attitude, and, consequently, the percentage of assimilation of the content. In addition to strengthening motivation and formulating an attitude for initial listening, the teacher should remove possible difficulties. The motivational attitude shows students what to pay attention to, what difficulties will arise and how to organize their work in connection with them. The task of the teacher is to arouse the interest of schoolchildren in the upcoming form of work with a motivational attitude.pay attention to what difficulties will arise and how to organize your work in connection with them.when does the form of verification indicate the name

The most typical settings are tasks for this stage of working with text:

·         discussion of questions/statements before listening.

·         guess by title/new words/illustrations.

·         summary of the main topic by the teacher, introduction to the problems of the text.

The stage of actually listening to the text. When forming listening skills, there may be several auditions, and it is important not to lose motivation. The novelty of the tasks will help in this:

·         listen to the text and insert the missing words in sentences

·         listen to the text and tell which of the proposed phrases were used in it without any changes

·         listen to the text and tell what definitions to the following words were found in it.

·         finish the following sentences.

·         listen to the text and say that it said something about something.

·         listen to the text and find the Russian/ English equivalent of words in a parallel column.

The post-text stage. After listening to the text and completing a number of exercises for it, you can continue to use it to develop oral and written speech skills. Comprehension control can be carried out both in a foreign language and in the native language; in the traditional way or with the help of tests.

The criteria for assessing the understanding of the content of the listened message depend primarily on how much the listener managed to realize the communicative intention, the installation.

The listener's attitude may be related to understanding basic and personally significant information, obtaining information of value for practical activities or for communication in a team. In this regard , tasks for checking the understanding of the text can be of three types:

– tasks for understanding the content of the listened;

– tasks for creative processing of perceived information;

– tasks for using the received information in communication and other activities (Rogova G.V.).

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We have developed 7 research-based guidelines for teaching listening: before, during, and after listening.

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Difficulties in auding and ways of preventing them in a listening task.

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Difficulties in auding and ways of preventing them in a listening task.

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Listening determines the success or failure of all practical language learning in the future.
Listening is the process of perceiving and understanding speech while it is being produced.
It is essential that students understand foreign speech and thus be able to participate in acts of oral communication.
The most challenging tasks are the listening tasks. The reason for this is the nature of listening because it is the only type of speech activity in which nothing depends on the person performing it. Since the subject of the message and the linguistic means are determined by the speaker, the receiver is forced to perceive the message as it is conveyed to him.

Tips for the student:
Know how to skip over unfamiliar words and phrases without compromising your understanding of the text as a whole:
- continue to listen attentively even if you have difficulty comprehending all of the information in the text;
- Do not turn your attention away when you encounter unfamiliar words;
- Try to relate and reconstruct the context for the words that you have understood (you can do this in the pauses between listening).
Be able to perceive and understand key words in the text:
- before listening, depending on the type of task, highlight the key words and expressions in the paragraphs of the task (answer options) that you should pay special attention to while listening, because they contain the meaning necessary to get the right answer;
- Analyze the key words, selecting synonyms to them, which will give you additional information and increase the probability of correct perception of the information contained in the text.
Tip for the teacher:
- You should read the text with the students with the omissions and then ask them to anticipate the missing information. You should not tell students whether their answers are correct or not, but let them see for themselves by listening to the text two or more times.
- It is essential that students understand the task at hand. It is important to use context and/or illustrations so that students try to imagine (understand) what they are hearing and, after listening, do the tasks. Students need to focus on the specific task and not be distracted by new or unfamiliar words

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There are 4 mechanisms of listening:

speech hearing,

memory,

probabilistic prediction and articulation.
Speech hearing is one of the most important of these and is one of the main prerequisites for successful foreign language learning. It ensures the perception of spoken speech, dividing it into meaningful syntagmata, word combinations, words. Thanks to this mechanism we can recognize familiar images in speech. But the distinction of parts of speech is only possible with a well-developed listening skill.
Memory mechanisms are needed to identify the part of speech we hear. We can talk about short-term memory and long-term memory. When we talk about short-term memory, it should be noted that we associate what we hear now with what we have just heard. We associate the end of a phrase with its beginning. Long-term memory is a storehouse of standards. When we hear something, we relate what we hear to standards of long-term memory,  information we already know.
There is also another kind of memory which is called operative memory. This is a short-term memory which is able to retain information for more than 10 seconds.
Probabilistic prediction is hypothesis generation, anticipation of events.
The semantic prediction is determined by the knowledge of the context and possible situations, which in turn involve the use of certain structures, clichés, speech formulas. Linguistic anticipation is determined by the fact that each word has a certain range of compatibility.
Articulation is the internal pronunciation of speech while listening to listening.
The clearer the articulation, the higher the level of listening will be.

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Here is an example of how you could use this framework to exploit a song:

Pre-listening

Students brainstorm kinds of songs

Students describe one of their favourite songs and what they like about it

Students predict some word or expressions that might be in a love song

While listening

Students listen and decide if the song is happy or sad

Students listen again and order the lines or verses of the song

Students listen again to check their answers or read a summary of the song with errors in and correct them.

Post-listening

Focus on content

Discuss what they liked / didn't like about the song

Decide whether they would buy it / who they would buy it for

Write a review of the song for a newspaper or website

Write another verse for the song

Focus on form

Students look at the lyrics from the song and identify the verb forms

Students find new words in the song and find out what they mean

Students make notes of common collocations within the song

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In this article I intend to outline a framework that can be used to design a listening lesson that will develop your students' listening skills and look at some of the issues involved.

Applying the framework to a song

The basic framework
The basic framework on which you can construct a listening lesson can be divided into three main stages.

Pre-listening, during which we help our students prepare to listen.

While listening, during which we help to focus their attention on the listening text and guide the development of their understanding of it.

Post-listening, during which we help our students integrate what they have learnt from the text into their existing knowledge.

Pre-listening
There are certain goals that should be achieved before students attempt to listen to any text. These are motivation, contextualisation, and preparation.

Motivation
It is enormously important that before listening students are motivated to listen, so you should try to select a text that they will find interesting and then design tasks that will arouse your students' interest and curiosity.

Contextualisation
When we listen in our everyday lives we hear language within its natural environment, and that environment gives us a huge amount of information about the linguistic content we are likely to hear. Listening to a tape recording in a classroom is a very unnatural process. The text has been taken from its original environment and we need to design tasks that will help students to contextualise the listening and access their existing knowledge and expectations to help them understand the text.

Preparation
To do the task we set students while they listen there could be specific vocabulary or expressions that students will need. It's vital that we cover this before they start to listen as we want the challenge within the lesson to be an act of listening not of understanding what they have to do.

While listening
When we listen to something in our everyday lives we do so for a reason. Students too need a reason to listen that will focus their attention. For our students to really develop their listening skills they will need to listen a number of times - three or four usually works quite well - as I've found that the first time many students listen to a text they are nervous and have to tune in to accents and the speed at which the people are speaking.

Ideally the listening tasks we design for them should guide them through the text and should be graded so that the first listening task they do is quite easy and helps them to get a general understanding of the text. Sometimes a single question at this stage will be enough, not putting the students under too much pressure.

The second task for the second time students listen should demand a greater and more detailed understanding of the text. Make sure though that the task doesn't demand too much of a response. Writing long responses as they listen can be very demanding and is a separate skill in itself, so keep the tasks to single words, ticking or some sort of graphical response.

The third listening task could just be a matter of checking their own answers from the second task or could lead students towards some more subtle interpretations of the text.

Listening to a foreign language is a very intensive and demanding activity and for this reason I think it's very important that students should have 'breathing' or 'thinking' space between listenings. I usually get my students to compare their answers between listenings as this gives them the chance not only to have a break from the listening, but also to check their understanding with a peer and so reconsider before listening again.

Post-listening
There are two common forms that post-listening tasks can take. These are reactions to the content of the text, and analysis of the linguistic features used to express the content.

Reaction to the text
Of these two I find that tasks that focus students reaction to the content are most important. Again this is something that we naturally do in our everyday lives. Because we listen for a reason, there is generally a following reaction. This could be discussion as a response to what we've heard - do they agree or disagree or even believe what they have heard? - or it could be some kind of reuse of the information they have heard.

Analysis of language
The second of these two post-listening task types involves focusing students on linguistic features of the text. This is important in terms of developing their knowledge of language, but less so in terms of developing students' listening skills. It could take the form of an analysis of verb forms from a script of the listening text or vocabulary or collocation work. This is a good time to do form focused work as the students have already developed an understanding of the text and so will find dealing with the forms that express those meanings much easier.

Applying the framework to a song
Here is an example of how you could use this framework to exploit a song:

Pre-listening

Students brainstorm kinds of songs

Students describe one of their favourite songs and what they like about it

Students predict some word or expressions that might be in a love song

While listening

Students listen and decide if the song is happy or sad

Students listen again and order the lines or verses of the song

Students listen again to check their answers or read a summary of the song with errors in and correct them.

Post-listening

Focus on content
Discuss what they liked / didn't like about the song

Decide whether they would buy it / who they would buy it for

Write a review of the song for a newspaper or website

Write another verse for the song

Focus on form

Students look at the lyrics from the song and identify the verb forms

Students find new words in the song and find out what they mean

Students make notes of common collocations within the song

Conclusion
Within this article I have tried to describe a framework for listening development that could be applied to any listening text. This isn't the only way to develop our students listening or to structure a listening lesson, but it is a way that I have found to be effective and motivating for my students.

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A framework for planning a listening skills lesson

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In this article I intend to outline a framework that can be used to design a listening lesson that will develop your students' listening skills and look at some of the issues involved.