Listening Skills and English Teaching

杨　娜/遵义师范学院

Listening Skills and English Teaching

杨娜/遵义师范学院

Listening plays an im portant role in foreign language learning.Am ong the four skills (listening, speaking, reading and w riting), it is considered the m ost im portant ability in English learning. This paper points out the chief factors w hich influence students’ listening level and offers som e approaches to im prove their listening com prehension.

English,; obstacle; listening skills; strategies

1.Introduction

The importance of mastering listening skills and improving listening comprehension has been widely accepted. Traditionally, if the students can not catch the meaning after listening,usually the teacher encourages students in time before providing the students with correct answer and asks them to do much practice after class. Such listening is by no means an effective way to radically improve students’ listening comprehension. It gives no instruction on how to do listening training , but just test the students’ listening ability.Therefore, the major targets are to find more effective listening teaching methods and enable students to become more competent listeners. This thesis presents some useful listening skills to promote students’ listening comprehension.

2.The main difficulties students encounter and the solutions in listening

We know that there are many factors influencing students’listening comprehension. But I think the following six factors are the most obvious ones:

A. New words

The appearance of new words in listening turns out to be the biggest obstacle. Further investigation shows that for most of the time the new words are not virtually new words. They may help students build up vocabulary and develop strategies for guessing the meaning of the word from context and background knowledge.(Su Yuan lian,2003)

B. Anxiety while listening

Of all the major difficulties students encounter in listening, anxiety comes second. This obstacle is bad for students’ performance indirectly and directly. It is is bad for their performance and reduces their participation, which will cause loss of confidence and motivation in the long run. Many students will fell frustrated when they come across new words and phrases, and fail to figure out the meaning. “Human comprehension actually does not function in the way that requires us to catch every bit of information.”(Brown, 2001)Teacher should guide students to face the difficult tasks, and assist them to recover confidence after setbacks. In addition, teacher should make the students fully aware of the fact that language anxiety can be transient. Self-talk and selfmonitoring might solve this problem.

C.Unfamiliar topic

Unfamiliar topics are also identified as a factor causing comprehension problems. To broaden their horizons by reading widely is an effective step. A brief introduction to the related backgroundknowledge before listening is also a good way to deal with this problem.(Su Yuan-lian, 2003)

D. Forgetting what they hear too quickly

Some students often complain that they forget what they hear too quickly. Creating mental linkages by relating new information to concepts in memory,or relating one piece of to another and visual imagery will help help memorize what they hear.

3.The listening skills in English teaching

The analysis of the obstacles and the methods above may help students overcome their major difficulties in doing listening activities. Next, I will give a brief introduction to some listening skills,hoping ,that help improve their listening comprehension.

A.Phonetics skill

The students should learn phonetic knowledge and do some training at the very beginning.

（1）Words link together(liaison)

If a word ends in a consonant and the next starts with a vowel,the words link together. The ending constant jumps over to the next word, which is called liaison.

（2）Vowel weaken (the central vowel)

The vowel in the function words become weak. That is, the vowels are changed into central vowel, the unstressed vowel. They are weak and pronounced lightly, which make them difficulty to catch.

（3）Assimilation

Sometimes phonetic changes in a speech sound when it becomes similar to another sound next to it. There is assimilation between would and you in the sentence “Would you like to go with us?”.

（4）Elision

It is the act of leaving out the sound of part of a word when you are pronouncing it.,as in we’ll, don’t, and let’s.

（5）Ellipsis

It indicates (grammar) leaving out a word or words from a sentence when the meaning can be understood without it or them. The sentence “He is dead and I alive.” contains an ellipsis, i.e. “ am ”.

B.Strategies in listening

（1） listening for key words

and phrases understand the general idea. Students When students are doing listening practice , they must take notes and write down key words like person’s name, place name, year, age, price,time, numeral, etc. In addition, Some signal words such as however, although, because, first, before, since, after and so on are very important.

（2） listening from context

Imagine you are listening to the recording “ ... I bought this great tuner JR’s. It was really cheap and now I can finally listen to National Public Radio broadcasts.” You don’t understand what a tuner means. However, if you think from the context, (he bought something-the tunerto listen to the radio.) you will understand that a tuner must be a kind of radio.This is a simple example but it demonstrates what you need to focus on: not the word that you don’t understand, but the words you do understand.

（3）intensive listening

Don’t worry if you cannot catch every word. The major points are the subject, subjunctive mood of people.You should pay attention to the new words, phrases, and look up in the dictionary.

（4）Extensive listening

（5）This way is to increase amount of listening.You can do the job when you fell tired in doing homework.In addition, bottom-up listening and top-down listening are very important skills.

4.Conclusion

Although the improvement of listening comprehension has attracted attention for both teacher and students,the skill remains poor for many students.the traditional way of listening teaching is considered to be one of the main reasons. Therefore, teacher not only providesstudents with various listening input, but also adopts effective listening strategies and skills to help students understand materials better. Gradually, the students’ listening comprehension will be improved.

References：

[1] Brown, H.D. Principles of Language Learning and Teaching. Beijing: Beijing Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press,2001.

[2] Cook,V. Second Language Learning and Language Teaching. London: Edward Arnold, 1996.

[3] 朱通伯 英语听力教程 [M] 外语教学与研究出版社.

[4] 韩明 听力技巧训练 [J] 中西部科技 2005 （11）.