Teaching Listening Strategies

Acquiring listening skills has been a concern since I was a child. I’ve always found difficult to understand tapes teachers used to play in the lessons. I even find it hard today, when learning another language, to grasp the general idea that is presented in the audio. I think that the problem stems from the fact that teachers and students carry out ineffective actions when dealing with listening activities. I consider that students may not be well prepared before the task as there seems to be no specific training of listening strategies or preparation of pre listening activities which may ease the task and lower the anxieties produced with the unknown. Besides, I think that we as students acquired ineffective listening habits which do no foster the understanding of oral texts or the acquisition of strategies that might prove helpful.

 

There seems to be two ineffective practices that teachers use when dealing with listening tasks which restrain students from reaching proficiency in listening skills. The first one is that teachers tend to start the audio without setting objectives, without predicting content thought previous activity, without reading the task to check understanding and comprehension. As there is not previous involvement with the text to came, and no guidance through the process of understanding oral texts, students get lost in the waves of spoken information and end up feeling disappointed and frustrated.

 

The second deals with the fact that teachers organise the listening task in such a way that it prevents students from thinking. In general, students rush through the task without using higher order thinking skills as they seem to be more concerned about getting at least one word which may get them back to the lost line. Besides, most of the tasks designed deal with basic listening survival skills such as, complete the word in a song or place the chorus in order.

 

However, to be an effective learner, students need to carry out several activities which are not always fostered:

• Establish a reason for learning and the objectives.
• Pedict information expected to find in the message
• Gather the raw speech and create an image of it in the short term memory.
• Organize the information by identifying the speech event (dialogue, lecture, radio) and the function of it.
• Recall background information.
• Assign meaning to the message
• Check if the message is understood
• Determine the information to be stored in the long term memory.

 

Brown, H. (2001). Teaching by Principles. New York: Longman.