4．How to improve students’ listening ability---designing effective classroom activities
Among the four skills (listening, speaking, reading, writing), foreign language learners often complain that listening is the most difficult one to acquire. Teaching listening should focus on process.
There are three stages in listening activities for language learners: pre—listening, while—listening, post—listening,
which will discuss in detail as follow:
4.1 Pre—listening activities
“Research points out that listening activity in general should consist of a pre—listening phase, which should make the context for listening explicit, clarify the purposes for listening, and establish goals, procedures and roles for listening. So a pre—listening activity can involve listeners in the following ways:
(1).By posing the tasks before the students listen to the topic, they are given a purpose for listening, which forces them to focus on selected information.
(2).The listener brings an orientation to a listening event. By opening up the topic, it arouses certain expectations and mentally prepares the students for the topic, it may also activate latest knowledge of vocabulary associated with the topic.
(3).Activating learner’s scripts and tuning in their prior knowledge about the topic helps to relate their background knowledge to the topic to be heard, thus enhancing the comprehension and interpretation of the received message.
(4).By brainstorming what they know about the topic before listening, learners will be able to compare what they know with what they are going to hear, and listen selectively.” [5] (p10)
4.1.1 Purpose
No less than in speaking, the listening process means that the learner must be motivated by a communicative purpose .This purpose determines to a large extent what meanings they must listen for and which parts of the text are most important to them. For example, there may be parts where he does not need to understand every detail, but only to listen for the general gist. There may be other parts where a topic of special significant arises, requiring them to listen for more detailed information—for example, so that they can report about the topic to other members of a group. At other times, a task may require them to listen for specific pieces of information distributed throughout the text.
“The activities will be grouped according to the kind of response that the learner must produce:
(1)Performing physical tasks (e.g. selecting pictures)
(2)Transferring information (e.g. into tabular form)
(3)Reformulating and evaluating information” [6] (p67-68)
4.1.2Choose the appropriate materials
Before having the class, teachers must choose and analysis the materials. “Teacher need to listen the tape all the way through .That way, they will be prepared for any problems, noises, accents etc. That way they can judge whether students will be able to cope with the tape and the tasks that go with it.” [7] ( p100) By doing so, the teacher will know the length of the materials, the difficult points and the focus of the materials, so the teacher can decide in advance how to go on with the teaching in class. Of course, it is a demand for teachers if all other courses. But some teachers do believe that they can teach listening course without any preparation so long as they have the tapes and reference books. So some researchers would like to emphasize the importance of preparations for a class: it is the basic need and also a basic insurance of an effective listening teaching. And the role of analyst, which means that teachers should analyze the functional patterns of the language used in the listening materials that students are to hear. The functions of a language can be simply divided into two patterns: the communication of emotion and the conveying of information. Communication of emotion means that the purpose of using a language is mainly for the establishment of harmonious relationship among the participants of social interaction.
4.1.3 Skills
(ⅰ)Prediction.
Research on speech processing and interpretation suggests that the listener’s ability to make intelligent guesses about what will come next plays a crucial role in their understanding of speech, and prediction is regarded by many researchers as on of the most powerful factors in comprehension. Therefore, a good listener is a good predictor. “By helping our students become
better predictors, we are helping them become better listeners.”[8] ( p86)
Prediction also involves asking questions and answering them. According to Fisher and Terry active comprehension is process of generating questions while reading and searching for answers to them. Questioning helps to establish the purpose and causes the listener to interact with the speech, confirming or rejecting expectations.
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