CC BY
9
UDC 800
Ishankulov Sh. U. teacher of the department of Foreign Languages
KEEI
Kashkadarya region, the city of Karshi
Niyozova Yu.T.
teacher of the department of Foreign Languages
KEEI
Kashkadarya region, the city of Karshi TEACHING LISTENING COMPREHENSION
Annotation: This article outlines reasons for getting students to listen in English, the kind of listening that teachers use in classrooms, factors that make listening difficult, types of classroom listening materials, examples of listening material, dealing with listening problems.
Key Phrases: Listening performance; listening materials; redundancy; listening
to tapes; spontaneous speech; script dictation; listening problems;
Ишонкулов Ш. У.
КМИИ, Хорижий тилар кафедраси уцитувчиси Кашцадарё вилояти, Карши шахар
Ниёзова Ю.Т.
КМИИ, Хорижий тилар кафедраси уцитувчиси Кашцадарё вилояти, Карши шахар
ТИНГЛАБ ТУШУНИШНИ УЦИТИШ
Аннотация: Ушбу мацолада талабалар инглиз тилида тинглашлари керак булган сабаблар, уцитувчилар дарсларда фойдаланадиган тинглашнинг тур-лари, тинглашни цийинлаштирадиган омиллар, тинглаш материалларининг турлари, тинглаш материалларига мисоллар, тинглаш муаммоларини ечиш уацида маълумотлар берилган.
Таянч иборалар: Тинглашни бажариш; тинглаш материаллари; куп маъноли-лик; тасмаларни тинглаш; беихтиёр; ёзув диктанти; тинглаш муаммолари;
Reasons for getting students to listen in English. One of the main reasons for getting students to listen to spoken English is to let them hear different varieties and accents - rather than just the voice of their teacher. In today's world, they need to be exposed not only to one variety of English (British English, for example) but also to varieties such as American English, Australian English,
Caribbean English, etc. Despite the desirability of exposing students to many varieties of English, however, common sense is called for. The number of different varieties will be a matter for the teacher to judge, based on the students' level, where the classes are taking place etc. But even if they only hear occasional (and very mild) varieties of English, which are different from the teacher's, it will give them a better idea of the world language, which English has become. The main method of exposing students to spoken English (after the teacher) is with using by taped material, which can exemplify a wide range of topics. The second 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 provide such exposure and students get vital information not only about grammar and vocabulary but also about pronunciation, rhythm, intonation, pitch and stress. Lastly, just as with reading, 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.
The kind of listening that teachers use in classrooms. The debate about the use of authentic listening material is just as fierce in listening as it is in reading. If, for example, we play a tape of a political speech to complete beginners, they will not understand a word. You could argue that such a tape would give them a feel for the sound of the language, but beyond that, it is difficult to see what they would get out of it. If, on the other hand, we give them a realistic (though not authentic) tape of a telephone conversation, they may learn much more about the language - and start to gain confidence as a result. Listening demands listener's engagement, too. Long tapes on subjects which students are not interested in at all will not only be de-motivating, but students might well 'switch off - and once they do that it becomes difficult for them to tune back to the tape. Comprehension is lost and the listening becomes valueless. Everything depends on level, and the kind of tasks that go with a tape. There may well be some authentic material, which is usable by beginners such as pre-recorded announcements, telephone messages etc. Advanced students may benefit from scripted material if it is interesting and subtle enough - and provided the tasks that go with it are appropriate for their level. Since listening to tapes is a way of bringing different kinds of speaking into the classroom, we would want to play different kinds of tape to them, e.g. announcements, conversations, telephone exchanges, lectures, 'plays', news broadcasts, interviews, radio programs, stories read aloud etc.
Factors that make listening difficult. As teachers are preparing lessons and techniques that are exclusively for teaching listening, a number of special characteristics of spoken language need to be taken into consideration. Students need to pay special attention to these characteristics or factors because they influence the understanding of speech and can even make listening comprehension very difficult. These factors are the following.
1. Clustering - In written language we are conditioned to attend to the sentence as the basic unit of organization. In spoken language, we break down speech into smaller groups of words. In teaching listening comprehension, therefore, you need to help students to pick out manageable clusters of words; or they will err in the other direction in trying to attend to every word in an utterance.
2. Redundancy - Spoken language, unlike most written language, has a good deal of redundancy. The next time you are in a conversation, notice the repetitions, rephrasing, repetitions, elaborations, and little insertions of "I mean" and "you know" here and there. Such redundancy helps the hearer to process meaning by offering more time and extra information. Learners can train themselves to profit from such redundancy by first becoming aware that not every new sentence of phrase will necessarily contain new information and by looking for the signals of redundancy.
3. Reduced forms - While spoken language does indeed contain a good deal of redundancy, it also has many reduced forms. Reduction can be phonological, morphological, syntactic, and pragmatic. These reductions pose significant difficulties especially to classroom learners who may have initially been exposed to the full forms of the English language.
4. Performance variables (hesitation, topic change) - In spoken language, except for planned discourse, hesitations, false starts, pauses, and corrections are common. Native listeners are used from very young ages to such performance variables while they can easily interfere with comprehension in foreign language learners. Everyday casual speech by native speakers also commonly contains ungrammatical forms. Some of these forms are simple performance slips.
5. Colloquial language - Learners who have been exposed to standard written English and/or "textbook" language sometimes find it surprising and difficult to deal with colloquial language. Idioms, slang, reduced forms, shared cultural knowledge are all manifested at some point in conversations. Colloquialisms appear in both monologues and dialogues.
6. Rate of delivery - Virtually every language learner initially thinks that native speakers speak too fast! Actually, the number and length of pauses used by a speaker is more crucial to comprehension than sheer speed. Learners will nevertheless eventually need to be able to comprehend language delivered at varying rates of speed and, at times, delivered with few pauses. Unlike reading, where a person can stop and go back to reread something, in listening the hearer may not always have an opportunity to stop the speaker. Instead, the stream of speech will continue to flow!
7. Stress, rhythm, and intonation - The prosodic features of the English language are very important for comprehension. In addition, intonation patterns are very significant not just for interpreting such elements as questions and statements and emphasis but more subtle messages like sarcasm, insult, solicitation, praise, etc.
8. Interaction - Classroom techniques that include listening components must include instruction in the two-way nature of listening. Students need to understand that good listeners (in conversation) are good responders.
Types of classroom listening materials:
1. Reactive Sometimes you simply want a learner to listen to the surface structure of an utterance for repeating it back to you. While this kind of listening performance requires little meaningful processing, it nevertheless may be legitimate, even though a minor, aspect of an interactive, communicative classroom. This role of a listener as merely a "tape-recorder" must be very limited. The one role that reactive listening can play in an interactive classroom is in brief choral or individual drills that focus on pronunciation.
2. Intensive Techniques whose only purpose is to focus on components (words, phonemes, intonation, discourse markers) of discourse may be considered to be intensive - as opposed to extensive - in their requirement that students single out certain elements of spoken language. Examples of intensive listening performance include:
❖ Students listen for cues in certain choral or individual drills.
❖ The teacher repeats a word of sentence several times to "imprint" it in the students' mind.
❖ The teacher asks students to listen to a sentence or a longer stretch of discourse and to notice a specified element, e.g., intonation, a grammatical structure.
3. Responsive - A significant proportion of classroom listening activity consists of short stretches of teacher language designed to elicit immediate responses. The students' task in such listening is to process the teacher talk immediately and to give an appropriate reply. Examples include:
> Asking questions ("How are you today?" "What did you do last night?").
> Giving commands ("Take out a sheet of paper and a pencil.").
> Seeking clarification ("What was that word you said?").
> Checking comprehension ("So, how many people were in the park?").
4. Selective - In longer stretches of discourse such as monologues, the task of the student is not to process everything that was said but rather to scan the material selectively for certain information. The purpose of such performance is not to look for global or general meanings, necessarily, but to be able to find important information. Selective listening differs from intensive listening in that the discourse is in relatively long lengths. Examples of such discourse include:
• Speeches.
• Media broadcasts.
• Stories and anecdotes.
Techniques promoting selective listening skills could ask students to listen
for:
• People's names.
• Dates.
• Certain facts of events.
• Location, situation, context, etc.
• Main ideas and/or conclusion.
5. Extensive - This sort of performance, unlike the intensive processing described above, aims to develop global understanding of spoken language. Extensive act could range from listening to lengthy lectures to listening to a conversation and deriving a comprehensive message or purpose. Extensive listening may require the student to use other interactive skills for full comprehension.
6. Interactive - Finally, there is listening performance that can include all five of the above types as learners actively participate in discussions, debates, conversations, role-plays, and other pair and group work. Their listening performance must be integrated with speaking.
Examples of listening material. The teaching of listening skills will follow the methodological model in the same way as for the teaching of reading skills. But training students in listening skills presents problems for both teacher and student which are not found with reading material. Listening as a skill certainly shares many similarities with reading. But the differences are there, too. Most importantly, the text itself is different. A written text is static. It can be consumed at the speed of the reader, and be read repeatedly. Not so spoken text: if it is on audio or video tape, it can be repeated, but it still happens at its speed, not the listener's. Of course, in conversation a listener can ask the speaker to repeat what is being said. However, the same is not true of a lecture you are listening to. Spoken language differs markedly from written text too. We have already discussed factors that make listening difficult. You should bear in mind that such speech phenomenon as hesitation reformulation, redundancy, pauses, reduced forms, and topic change and a natural part of spontaneous speech.
Listening for details and writing a Script Dictation. One way of having students listen to a tape in a detailed way is to give them a script dictation. This means that students are given the tapescript with some of the words blanked out. All they have to do is fill in the words. It is easy to create script dictations. Let us imagine that students have already listened to the text about National Gallery and answered the questions. The teacher now asks the students to try to fill in the gaps before listening to the tape again. They can be extremely useful in reminding students of the difference between written prose and the way people speak. Tapes, which the teacher makes, are often the most exciting ones for the teacher and the students to use. A warning needs to be given, however. In the first place, it is difficult to get good quality on some tapes and tape machines.
Dealing with listening problems. As we have already said, listening can cause problems. In general, these can be summarized as panic and difficulty. Students often panic when they see the tape recorder because they know that they
are faced with challenging task. Two things are guaranteed to increase that panic! The first is to refuse to play a tape more than once and the second is to expose an individual student's lack of success in the listening. It is usually a good idea to play a tape all the way through on a first listening so that students can get an idea of what it sounds like. If students have listened to a tape to answer a comprehension task it can be very threatening for the teacher to point to individuals and ask them for their answers to questions - especially when they know that they don't know! Some teachers and students find that listening to tapes is extremely difficult, especially when tapes are long. Yet we may want to use long extracts because they contribute to our overall teaching plan and because the topic is interesting. If the tape is difficult, there are a number of things you can do to make it easier.
• Give students the first third of the tapescript. They can read it at home if they want. In class, they discuss how the story is going to end or what is going to happen.
• Preview vocabulary. Choose a small number of key words that students do not know. Teach them to the students before they listen.
• Use the tapescript. In general, it may be a good idea for the students to look at the tapescript after the first couple of times listening if they are having difficulty in coping with the tape. You could also cut the tapescript into paragraphs - or even smaller pieces - which they have to put in the right order as they listen to the tape.
These are just some ideas to make your listening activities more motivating and more successful, especially where there are difficulties.
Real education must consider the whole child and the purpose of human life and civilization. Real education must acknowledge the spiritual and emotional development of the child; the importance and influence of the arts and real happiness on the education process; and integrate them into the curriculum and evaluation process.
In summary, after completing this article, you should be able to name eight factors that make listening difficult, name and describe six types of classroom listening materials, give examples of listening materials, explain how teachers can deal with listening problems in the classroom, and design your own listening exercises.
Additional Literatures:
1. Никитенко З. Н. Обучение произношению детей 6 лет в курсе английского языка для I класса // Иностранные языки в школе. - 1992. - № 1. - С. 36-43.
2. Павлова С. В. Обучение иноязычному произношению на коммуникативной основе. // Иностранные языки в школе. - 1990. - № 1. -С. 29-32.
3. Пассов Е. И. Методическое мастерство учителя иностранного языка // Иностранные языки в школе. - 1984. - № 6. - С. 24-29.
4. Douglas B. H. Teaching by principles: an interactive approach to language pedagogy - Longman, 2000. - 480 p.
5. Harmer J. How to Teach English [new ed.] - Pearson Longman, 2007. - 288 p.
6. Ishonqulov Sh. U., Ziyatov A.T. Emotional Intelligence and Spiritual Development: Modern Science International scientific journal №11, Vol. II, 2020. pp. 224-226
