Contents introduction chapter theoretical bases of teaching listening

1.2 Teacher’s speech as basic form of teaching listening comprehension

Teaching is a very complicated complex process. Its success depends on several factors. One of the most important factors is a teacher himself or herself.

There are three main activities that teachers have to manage simultaneously:

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  managing the group;
  
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  managing activities;
  
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  managing the learning.
  

In many group teaching situations, the role of the teacher is that of facilitator of learning: leading discussions, asking open-ended questions, guiding process and task, and enabling active participation of learners and engagement with ideas. However, small groups function and behave in various ways and have different purposes. Teachers therefore need to be able to adopt a range of roles and skills to suit specific situations, often during the same teaching session. According to McCrorie the roles that may be adopted include that of:

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  the instructor, who imparts information to students;
  
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  the neutral chair;
  
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  the consultant, from whom learners can ask questions;
  
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  the devil’s advocate;
  
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  the commentator;
  
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  the wanderer, such as in a larger workshop;
  
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  the absent friend³.
  

Making the shift from teacher as expert to facilitator is sometimes seen as diminishing a teacher’s power and authority, but this should not be the case. Facilitating learning is empowering for both the learner and the teacher and frees the teacher from many of the burdens that having to be an "expert" might entail. It would traditionally have been seen as a weakness for a teacher to say "I don’t know, let’s find out" or "I don’t know, do any of you students know the answer?" and clearly clinical teachers need to know more about many topics than their students or trainees, but medical science is changing so rapidly that no one can know everything. Implementing an evidence-based approach to clinical learning and to medical practice involves finding out about the latest research. You can use these techniques and this approach to facilitate your own and your students’/trainees’ learning ⁴.
Practical learning a foreign language is possible only under condition when it is used as a mean of communication. A lesson has a lot of opportunities for using a language as a mean of communication between a teacher and a student. While choosing material for a lesson a teacher should take into account certain purposes of a lesson:

1. 
   developing listening comprehension;
   
2. 
   broadening passive vocabulary and potential foresight skills.
   

That is why it is essential that material should be comprehensible and having all the qualities listed above. If to speak about grammar constructions used by a teacher during a lesson it is clear he or she cannot use all of them. However, basic structures should be taken into account as students usually memorize the phrases repeated by a teacher as a whole. A teacher has more freedom with lexical material. He or she should include into a lesson new words all the time using such techniques as language guess, context and potential foresight⁵.
Presenting new material should be carefully dosed and balanced. At first a teacher should give 2-4 new expressions a lesson. Besides he or she should add new elements every lesson. But new material should be brought only in case when a teacher is absolutely sure that the old one has been already memorized. A teacher should also take all the measures so that students could understand it correctly. There are several techniques for gaining it:

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  a teacher can vary the forms of pronunciation of the same phrases each lesson. For instance, "read please" can be substituted for "will you read". These variants will not cause troubles in understanding as separate parts of it have been already used by a teacher;
  
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  each new word should be pronounced 2-3 times suggesting students guessing what it might mean. For example, the expression "raise your hands" has been mentioned before. The phrase "put down your hands" will be easier to understand. This also helps to develop students’ abilities to analysis and synthesis;
  
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  new phrases should be repeated in different ways, in 4-5 lessons new phrases may be included in the questions to students so that they could be ready to face them in real life.
  

That means the dialogue between a teacher and a student becomes the leading part of having students got used to oral speech in foreign language and, thus, the first fundamental step to auding itself.

1.3 Principles for developing listening ability

Using general knowledge about language skill development, we can draw up some guidelines for developing listening ability.

Listening ability develops through face-to-face interaction. By interacting in English, learners have the chance for new language input and the chance to check their own listening ability. Face-to-face interaction provides stimulation for development of listening for meaning.
Listening develops through focusing on meaning and trying to learn new and important content in the target language. By focusing on meaning and real reasons for listening in English, learners can mobile both their linguistic and non-linguistic abilities to understand.
Listening ability develops through work on comprehension activities. By focusing on specific goals for listening, learners can evaluate their efforts and abilities. By having well-defined comprehension activities, learners have opportunities for assessing what they have achieved and for revision.
Listening develops through attention to accuracy and an analysis of form. By learning to perceive sounds and words accurately as they work on meaning-oriented activities, our learners can make steady progress. By learning to hear sounds and words more accurately, learners gain confidence in listening for meaning⁶.
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 with its own idiosyncrasies. 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, Indian English or West African English. There are, of course, problems associated with the issue of language variety. Within British English, for example, there are many different dialects and accents. The differences are not only in the pronunciation of sounds (‘bath’ like ‘laugh’ vs. ‘bath’ like ‘cat’) but also in grammar (the use of ‘shall’ in northern varieties compared with its use in ‘Standard English’ - the southern, BBC-type variety). The same is of course true American, Indian or West African English.
Despite the desirability of exposing students to many varieties of English, however, common sense is called for. The number of different varieties (and the degree to which they are different from the one students are learning) will be a matter for the teacher to judge. But even if they only hear occasional 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 second major reason for teaching listening is because 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.
Lastly, 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 listeners⁷.
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:

1. 
   discrimination between sounds;
   
2. 
   recognizing words;
   
3. 
   identifying grammatical groupings of words;
   
4. 
   identifying ‘pragmatic units’ - expressions and sets of utterance which function as whole units to create meaning;
   
5. 
   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;
   
6. 
   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;
   
7. 
   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.Even though a person may have good listening ability, he or she may not always be able to understand what is being said. In order to understand messages, some conscious action is necessary to use this ability effectively, so it is not possible to view it directly, but we can see the effects of this action. The underlying action for successful listening is decision making ⁸.