CC BY
0УДК 81-139
Nusibaqyn Zhuldyz
Lecturer of Department World languages Taraz Regional University named after M.Kh. Dulaty (Taraz, Kazakhstan)
DEVELOPING EXTENSIVE LISTENING SKILLS BY USING TED TALK CHANNELS
Аннотация: extensive listening (EL) is an approach to teaching listening which can help students develop their listening fluency in a more enjoyable way. However, unlike extensive reading which has now enjoyed widespread recognition, EL has received relatively little attention, partly because of the limited availability of suitable listening materials. Given the popularity of TED Talks which are freely available online. Two questions guided our research:
1. What factors are considered important by students when choosing TED Talks as their extensive listening practice?
2. What benefits do they get from viewing TED Talks?
Ключевые слова: extensive listening, extensive viewing, TED Talks, listening materials,
learning.
Listening is key to effective communication. Listening comprehension is defined as an interactive process in which listeners actively construct meaning. To construct meaning, learners draw upon content and topical knowledge and also linguistic knowledge including phonological, grammatical and discoursal knowledge. Despite its important role in communication and despite the fact that students often find listening difficult, this oral receptive skill has not been widely studied. [1,p 113].
One approach to teaching listening that has attracted attention in recent years is extensive listening (EL).All types of listening activities that allow learners to receive a lot of comprehensible and enjoyable listening input. By having this comprehensible and enjoyable listening input, students can reap the benefits of repeated exposure to
interesting and rich language which can in turn facilitate the development of their listening proficiency. [2, p 52].
One possible reason why EL is not as popular as Extensive Reading (ER) is that suitable listening materials are often not easy to find. While graded readers are now widely available, graded listening materials are rather scarce. However, with the advent of technology, teachers can now turn to freely available listening materials (i.e., podcasts) on the internet. Research studies on the use of podcasts provide promising early evidence that regular listening to podcasts can help students develop their listening skills.
Unlike previous studies that examined the use of podcasts for extensive listening, this study investigates the use of video based presentations from the famous TED Talk Series. The TED series has emerged as one of the premier websites for providing presentation-based video for global viewers. TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design. Since 2006, TED Talks have been made available in the TED website. According to the statistics there are more than 1800 talks that are publicly available on the website along with a rich collection of 35,000 transcripts in over 30 languages. The number may double or triple in the years to come as new videos are being added at a faster rate.
Given the ease of access to TED Talks, a number of listening researchers have started to investigate the extent to which the video-based talks can be productively exploited for language learning purposes. One such study was recently conducted by professor of "Tokyo Medical University" Yoshikazu Takaesu who set out to examine the impact of TED Talks for extensive listening for his freshmen college students who enrolled in his English for Academic Purposes (EAP) course. The results showed that both lower and higher proficiency students improved their listening comprehension skills.
Definition of Extensive Listening
Extensive listening (EL) is an approach to teaching listening which aims to give students more opportunity to listen to spoken English without any pressure from anyone. In IL, the teacher is often the center of the instructional procedure, selecting
materials and designing listening tasks for students to do in the classroom. In EL, the students are the center, they get to set their own target, choose appropriate and personally relevant listening materials and decide what to do after they finish listening. One of the most important considerations in EL is that students listen to materials that are both enjoyable and comprehensible. [3, p 102].
Benefits and Challenges of Extensive Listening
Numerous benefits of extensive listening have been reported in the professional literature on ELT and TESOL. These benefits can be categorized into three main themes:
1. Improvement of students' listening fluency
2. Improvement in listening comprehension
3. Improvement of other language skills.
In terms of the enhancement of listening fluency, students who listen more extensively are able to deal with a faster speech rate. Students sometimes cannot comprehend spoken language simply because the speakers speak too fast. For students who have limited exposure to spoken language, speech rates can be one of the hurdles in developing listening fluency.
In terms of overall language comprehension, extensive listening can help students develop a higher degree of familiarity with common language features of the target language, which can in turns enable them to experience a higher and deeper level of comprehension. EL can help familiarize students with common features of spoken language such as assimilation, contraction, resyllabification and other forms of speech blending. [4].
In terms of the effects on other language skills, students who listen a great deal can develop their vocabulary knowledge. As they listen to a wider variety of topics, they become more exposed to a larger range of vocabulary words. Vocabulary words encountered in meaningful contexts via listening are more likely to be learned and retained in students' long-term memory. This way of learning is referred to as incidental vocabulary learning. Incidental vocabulary learning from extensive listening is an effective way of acquiring vocabulary from context. Apart from that, students can
also practice their speaking skill. As a matter of fact, in a relaxing manner, they can be more attentive to academic speaking features such as the accurate pronunciation, word stress, and intonation [5, p 768].
Another important potential benefit comes from the flexibility and freedom to practice the skill. Because the students are in control, i.e., they select the materials they want to listen to, they tend to be more motivated to do more listening on their own, without any coercion from the teachers. It has been suggested that this type of listening is more likely to facilitate language acquisition.
There are several benefits of using TED Talk videos:
First, TED Talk videos are interesting because they include a wide range of topics such as technology, entertainment, design, business, science, and global issues .
Secondly, TED Talks have a distinctive "interactive transcript" feature embedded in each talk. The combination of reading while listening/viewing to video materials is a pleasantly rewarding experience. It can enhance students' motivation and comprehension of the listening materials as well.
Thirdly, TED videos are sharable. Learners can easily share the links using social media or download them as offline contents. Besides being sharable, TED Talks are also searchable "in multiple ways, including by speaker, subject, or theme. This aspect gives the listeners flexibility in finding topics of their interest. Lastly, TED Talks can be accessed at any time and any place as long as one is connected to the Internet. Any mobile devices such as tablets, smart phones, laptops, or computers can access TED Talks without any limit. TED Talks can also motivate and inspire students to have the eagerness to learn on their own, thus promoting self-directed and independent learning in our students.[5].
Effects on Other Language Skills.
The greatest benefit from watching the TED Talks was the effect on other language skills. Although the studies about the effects of extensive listening on other language learning benefits are relatively small, informal classroom evidence seems to suggest that students do enjoy numerous language learning benefits from it. Extensive listening, according to them, can help students develop their listening vocabulary
through incidental vocabulary learning which can in turn greatly facilitate their ability to process spoken text with greater fluency and comprehension. The data reported in Table 7 below shows that the students in our study acquired plenty of vocabulary words from listening to TED videos. [6, p 29].
СПИСОК ЛИТЕРАТУРЫ:
1. Hamouda, A. An Investigation of Listening Comprehension Problems Encountered by Saudi Students in the EL Listening Classroom. International Journal of Academic Research in Progressive Education and Development, 2013. 113-155;
2. Renandya, W. A. & Farrell, T. S. C. 'Teacher, the tape is too fast!' Extensive listening in ELT. ELT Journal. 2010. p52- 59;
3. Mayora, C. A. Extensive listening in a Colombian university: Process, product, and perceptions. 2017. 101-121;
4. Renandya, W. A., & Jacobs, G. M. Extensive reading and listening in the L2 classroom. 2016;
5. Nurmukhamedov, U. Lexical Coverage of TED Talks: Implications for Vocabulary Instruction. TESOL Journal 2017, 8(4), 768-790;
6. Vo, Y. Developing extensive listening for EFL learners using Internet resources. Hawaii Pacific University TESOL Working Paper Series, 2013. 11, 29-51
