Week 6 Reading - Teaching LISTENING

Confusion

Anxiety

Fear of technological problems

Insecurity

Embarrassment

Lack of materials

These are just a few things i had on my list when i think back at my past experience in learning the skill of Listening. As i do the reading for this week, i greatly agree with the author when he states that Listening was even a more neglected skill than Speaking in Language teaching in the past. The book mentions a lot of reasons why this happened, among which i feel highly identified with the idea that because the listening ability comes so naturally in one's first language acquisition, and no one has ever been taught how to listen in their native language, the same assumption is applied when it comes to second language acquisition. However, the truth is: Listening in a second/foreign language is a completely different story, and learners definitely nees a lot of instruction and practice in order to become a competent listener in their target language.

About Teaching Listening, I really like Brown's idea of dividing the set of skills into two: macro and micro. In my opinion, these two levels create the main principles and criteria upon which language teachers can build up their own syllabus in teaching Listening depending on the proficiency level of students, as well as conduct their formal and informal assessment on students' performance. Also, the listening techniques listed in the Brown book can act as a guideline for language teachers, and i think they will work best if there are a good combination of bottom-up, top-down and interactive exercises. One more thing i would like to add to the teaching principles is to always set a specific goal for each listening lesson and lead students to using specific skills to obtain that goal. For instance, for one particular lesson, the goal can be listening for main ideas, and the skill exercise might be one which requires students to answer questions about what the speaker wants to convey in his/her speech. These goals of course vary depending on students' needs, but form my point of view, to make sure that students are always listening for a reason is very important. This is reinforced in Morley's principle of task orientation in developing listening materials put forward in the Apple book.

Moreover, like other language skills, the mastering of the skill of listening requires a lot of practice outside the classroom, especially in the case of EFL learners. Back to the Listening-experience list i made above, in order to overcome these obstacles and better understand spoken English, i did a lot of self-study and practice. It was not easy at all at first. Imagine how frustrated you will be when listening to people talking but can only have a very vague idea of what they're talking about, you'll know how hopeless i was at the time. Not to give up, then, was my biggest challenge, since naturally no one wants to listen to something they can't understand. And it turned out that to me, even though it does not make me a perfect listener in English, practice does enable me to make progess. Therefore, i greatly agree with what is discussed in the book about the development of self-access listening materials. This will raise students' awareness and drive them to do more self-study in listening, especially to EFL students whose exposure to the target language mostly takes place in the classroom.