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SOME FEATURES TO IMPROVING LISTENING SKILLS
Ergasheva Sh.P. ®
Teacher Tashkent Medical Academy Fergana branch
Summary
In this article describes about language learning depends on listening. Listening provides the aural input that serves as the basis for language acquisition and enables learners to interact in spoken communication.
Keywords: listening, aural, language acquisition, communication, language instruction, skill, strategies, long intonation.
Аннотация
В данной статье описывается процесс изучения языка, который зависит от слушания. Слушание обеспечивает звуковой вход, который служит основой для овладения языком и позволяет учащимся взаимодействовать в устной речи.
Ключевые слова: слух, звуковой вход, овладение языком, общение, языковые инструкции, умение, стратегии, долгая интонация.
«Effective listening is a skill that underpins all positive human relationships, spend some time thinking about and developing your listening skills - they are the building blocks of success» - Richard Branson.
Listening plays an important role in second language instruction for several reasons. If you cannot hear it well you will find it hard to communicate or perhaps you cannot pass your listening examination for instance. In fact, students often take the wrong way when listening and this leads them to the poor result. It should be noted that the learner's perception of their listening problem and strategies can affect their comprehension both positively and negatively. Thus, in order to help students get improved with their listening skill, it is needed finding out their listening problems which cause difficulties to them. According the problems in listening were accompanied with the four following factors: the message, the speaker, the listener and the physical setting. Furthermore, a numbers of research have been carried out to pick out the problem in listening. The problems were believed to cause by the speech rate, vocabulary and pronunciation. As Flowerdew & Miller (1996) assumed that the problems of the students were for the speed of delivery, new terminology and concept, difficulty in focusing and the physical environment. As we stated in his article "listening to VOA: advantages, problems and solutions" the students have to face these three problems. First of all, the students find it hard to understand proper names as they have never heard about it before. In other words, they have no background knowledge about what they are listening. The second problem is believed to rise from the unfamiliar, uninteresting and too long listening which makes the students feel strange, discouraged and bored of what they are hearing. The last one is assumed to be about the sound connections and intonation spoken by native speakers with different accents.
Firstly to the students, they should spend much more time on practicing. They should listen to a variety of topics in order to get familiar with them. The background knowledge will be enriched as well as the skill. In addition, the students should know to apply suitable strategies to each kind of listening text in order to get the best result.
However, the skill of students will not be improved the best without teachers. Teachers play such a significant in building up their skill. By each lesson, the teachers show his students the ways in each stage of listening comprehension. Generally, there are three stages: pre-
® Ergasheva Sh.P., 2017 г.
listening, while-listening and post-listening. Furthermore, he or she will advise their students with the syllabus they can self-study at home. In short, this research of mine does not focus on how teachers carry out their lesson but it is a chance to understand more about the student's problems. There are the micro skills that needed in an enable listener:
• predicting what people are going to talk about
• guessing unknown words or phrases without panicking
• using one's won knowledge of the subject to help one understand
• identify relevant points; rejecting irrelevant information
• retaining relevant points (note-taking, summarizing)
• recognizing cohesive devices e. g such as and which, including link words, pronouns, references, etc.
• understanding different intonation patterns and uses of stress, etc, which give clues to meaning and social setting.
• understanding inferred information, e. g, speaker's attitude or intention
To conclude, listening is vital not only in language learning but also in daily communication. However, the students seem to have problems with listening. Here are the most common problems collected from the learners: the time they spend on studying themselves is too little to improve the skill, the inappropriate strategies of learner would be a hindrance for their listening comprehension. The problems are also caused from the listening material and physical settings. To acquire an acceptable listening skill, students themselves should have much more exposure to variety of listening. Simultaneously, they should learn the tips or strategies through each of their learning themselves. Teachers play an important role in teaching learners strategies and how to apply them into the listening task. These are suggestion to solve the problems as well as to upgrade the listening skill for language learners.
At the end of this paragraph, I am doing a small project entitled "Difficulties and strategies in listening". This aims to find out the problems that most students face when listening. Hopefully, the findings I get from this project contribute a small part to help you with better listening. I would really appreciate if you spare your valuable time to fill in this questionnaire.
1. Have you ever failed your listening test? (tick out the best answer)
• Never
• Once
• Twice
• Three times
• More than three
2. How often do you self-study listening at home? (tick out the best answer)
• Never
• Rarely
• Sometimes
• Often
3. How do you self-study at home? (you can tick more than one)
• Listen to English songs
• Listen to tapes or disks of the syllabus in university
• Listen to news in English
• Other
4. What do you do before listening? (you can tick more than one)
• Go through the questions and guess what the topic is about
• Nothing to do just ready to listen
• Guess the content of the listening
• Ask about the new words
• Read the task instruction
Other:
6. What do you do if you can not understand words or phrases while listening? ( tick out the best answer)
• Ignore it and keep on listening
• Try to guess its meaning
• Feel depressed and cannot listen anymore
Literature
1. D. Renukadevi. The Role of Listening in Language Acquisition; the Challenges & Strategies in Teaching Listening; (2014),
2. M. A. Esperanza. Approaches to the development of listening skills in ELT: A state of the art; ... 2009;
3. Anderson, Anne and Lynch, Tony. Language Teaching, A scheme for teacher education: LISTENING. 1988;
