Effective Approaches to Teaching Listening Among First-year EFL Students in Chinese Universities

Yue Lin

School of Foreign Languages & Literature, Yunnan Normal University, Kunming, China

Email: kittyylin@hotmail.com

[Abstract] This paper presents the significant status of listening comprehension in Chinese EFL context. It also explores effective teaching approaches for improving English learners’listening comprehension abilities. With the assistance of such effective approaches, the special difficulties in listening comprehension and English learners’ main problems in listening comprehension can be rectified. At the same time, Chinese EFL learners’other abilities may also be improved.

[Keywords] listening; listening comprehension; listeners; effective approaches

Introduction

Listening, among the four elementary language skills, which include listening, speaking, reading and writing in English learning process, is the most essential and vital receptive skill when language learners prepare themselves for the process of the intake and input of the new language. However, all too often, listening is yet commonly considered as “the Cinderella skill in second language learning” (Nunan, 2001, p. 199). This smart metaphor evidently reflects the fact that for most learners, listening is all too often believed to be a passive and secondary skill, and therefore is “neglected in favor of speaking, a productive skill” (Lengo, 1986, p. 42). As for most people, the criterion to judge a person’s second language competence and proficiency is his speaking or writing capability. A large number of Chinese learners are led astray by the traditional notion. However, more and more Chinese EFL teachers and learners have come to realize the need to reinforce and consolidate the listening skills. In the first place, listening comprehension is the “pivot of speaking skills” (Lengo, 1986, p. 42). Without a complete understanding of listening content, obviously a person cannot respond in an appropriate way. Along with speaking, listening also provides a basis for the development of the other two language skills: reading and writing. Listening also plays a significant role in the interactive communication in language classrooms in Chinese context.

Defining Listening and Listening Comprehension

According to Purdy (1997, p. 8), listening is “the active and dynamic process of attending, perceiving, interpreting, remembering, and responding to the expressed (verbal and nonverbal), needs, concerns, and information offered by other human beings”.

O’Malley, Chamot & Kupper (1989, p. 19) provide their further and more extensive definition of listening comprehension, they assert:

Listening comprehension is an active and conscious process in which the listener constructs meaning by using cues from contextual information and from existing knowledge, while relying upon multiple strategic resources to fulfill the task requirement.

Therefore, as far as listening or listening comprehension are concerned, successful listeners need to own the ability to understand and decode a message, the capability to apply varieties of listening strategies, and the ability to make critical response to listening materials in different ways.

The Major Problems and Difficulties Which Chinese Learners Encounter While Listening

Mother-tongue interference

“It was assumed that where there were differences between L1 and L2, the learner’s L1 knowledge would interfere with the L2…” (Ellis, 1985, p. 6) (Cited in Sun, 2001, p. 28). Since most Chinese learners of English learn English in the Chinese context, they will more or less get some negative influences from their native language-Chinese. Like most foreigners who find it really difficult to grasp the four tones in Chinese language, the Chinese learners also discover that the complex word stress, intonation, elision, linking of connected speech, strong and weak forms, etc.. of English language are really difficult to identify and distinguish, for the Chinese learners never encounter or hear them in Chinese language. For example, some learners can not distinguish the words rice and lice, or thirty and dirty, because there are no identical pronunciations of phonetics［r］［θ］in Chinese language. The Chinese learners naturally find the substitutes of other sounds in Chinese phonetics, their pronunciations are interfered greatly by their mother-tongue, and are thereby inaccurate. Their listening ability will accordingly be negatively influenced because of their incorrect pronunciation.

Learners’incapability of exerting prior background knowledge (schema)

According to the psychologist Barlett’s (1932) (Cited in Nunan, 2001, p. 201) definition, “schema theory is based on the notion that past experiences lead to the creation of mental frameworks that help us make sense of new experiences.” Although the learners’existing or acquired schemata are of great value in the whole listening process, many Chinese learners are unable to activate a certain prior background knowledge to make sense of the acoustic signals that speech presents to them. Hence what they have obtained from the acoustic materials are some fragmented bits rather than the original messages.

Inappropriate listening materials

Nowadays, various audio and/or video materials are commonly applied in college English classrooms in China, most teachers place their emphasis on listening to authentic materials. Nevertheless, the learners’practical level of listening comprehension is often neglected. We can imagine, if, for instance, the teacher plays a very formal political campaign speech or inaugural speech to the freshmen of non-English majors, they will not understand even a word except for getting little sense of the sound or pronunciation of the language itself. Consequently, the learners’ confidence for further listening will be greatly damaged. In the second place, the inappropriate length of the recordings is disturbing for most listeners as well.

Failure to applying the effective and efficient listening strategies and tactics

The efficient high-capability listeners usually adopt a flexible range of listening strategies and tactics. They might use cognitive strategies, including: “inferencing, elaboration, prediction, contexutalization, fixation and reconstruction” (Goh, 1998, p. 135) in their listening course. On the contrary, the inefficient learners, who are of lower ability in listening, cannot apply such strategies to listen for both the gist as well as specific aspects of details to do some analytical and comparative listening assignment.

Insufficient scaffolding aids from the teacher

Stereotypically, large number of language teachers consider that the language learners’listening comprehension abilities are achieved all by themselves. The teacher, however, is seen to be of less value and importance in the whole listening process. The teacher’s role is taken for granted as the trivial one in acoustic classrooms. Many teachers, thereby, do not make good preparation and management for the listening class. During the listening class, some teachers deny the opportunities and responsibilities to do any scaffolding for the learners when they encounter some obstacles.

Solutions

As stated above, we can clearly see that there are indeed some special difficulties and problems existing when the listeners try to understand what they are listening. However, without the teacher’s help, the listeners may have certain capabilities to overcome difficulties and solve the problems, but not all. The teacher, obviously, acts a very important role for helping the listeners to improve their listening comprehension abilities in the language classrooms. For most EFL learners in China, the listening comprehension course is very essential. The following parts will be the effective teaching stages and approaches for developing and improving listening comprehension skills in the language classrooms.

Developing learners’listening skills through the pedagogical instruction and training: Teaching stages for listening comprehension course

Stage One: Pre-Listening Stage(Listening for Prediction)

A)The teacher should deal with words, expressions and phrases. The teacher can pay more attention to the pronunciation factors, such as word stress, intonation, elision, linking of connected speech, strong and weak forms, in order that the learners can get familiar with the new lexical items before listening. The most important point is that the learners should try to eliminate the interferences of their mother-tongue-Chinese.

B)The second procedure in pre-listening stage is to help learners get themselves accustomed to the interferences from features of English spoken language. For example, the teacher may play the recordings of a very short and simple telephone conversation or some light talks which can assist the listeners relax and prepare their ears as well as their whole minds for the immediate major listening contents. The teacher may supply scaffoldings on the appreciation of the informal colloquial language factors, such as “the use of incomplete utterances, repetitions, hesitations” (Harmer, 2003, p. 99) and the speaker’s tone, rate, accent, interjections, rhythm, and background noise etc. The listeners may become more sensitive to the features of spoken language through this episode.

C)For the next step, the teacher can provide relevant cultural background knowledge or information to activate or stimulate the learners to bring their existing schema or their prior experiences into the classroom. Apparently, the learners listen to something “because they have a desire to do so and some purpose to achieve” (Harmer, 1990, p. 176). Therefore, the teacher can make use of the listeners’expectations to ask them to make some predictions for the listening material, which will arouse their curiosity and interests, and they will have a definite purpose for listening.

Stage Two: While-Listening Stage(Listening for Comprehension)

A) General Listening.The teacher plays the audio materials for the learners. Then the listeners listen to the appropriate authentic audio material for the first time in order to get gist of it. If there are still some unfamiliar words and expressions existing, the teacher should encourage the listeners to anticipate the meanings by adopting some effective listening strategies, such as prediction, inferencing and contexutalization. Then the listeners’expectation and prediction will be substantiated or refined as the audio materials goes on. The process may be difficult, but is vital for helping the listeners get a general impression and understanding of the listening material.

B) Intensive Listening.The teacher then plays the audio materials a second time, asking the listeners to listen to the materials again. If necessary, the teacher should even help the listeners relieve from the phenomenon of anxiety by offering more hints or clues for the listening task. In this case, emphasis should be laid on observing the important information and specific details of the listening material. It does not mean that the listeners should capture all the syllables or focus themselves on each word. What they need to do is to employ the effective listening tactics, such as inferencing, elaboration, prediction, contexutalization, fixation and so on to grasp the specific details essential for their better understanding of the listening contents. Meanwhile, the teacher should exert its scaffolding role and act as a guide to give some interpretations and explanations for some difficult sentences and language points by using context.

C) General Listening.The listeners are required to keep an ear to the listening the materials for the third time. In this case, as for the listeners, the listening strategies of contexutalization, fixation and reconstruction should be elicited. From another aspect, if necessary, the teacher may present the top-level structure model to aid the learners to analyze the overall organizational structure of the listening passage or text, to assist the listeners to get better understanding of the inner connection of the structure. However, during this period, some listeners may run out of the energy and exhibit the state of fatigue or tiredness. They then may be demotivated and indifferent to the listening materials. Therefore, subsequently, the teacher should play its role as activator to demand the communicative response or interaction from the learners. The learners may be asked to make immediate discussions, or present reflective responses to one major issue which is under heated discussion in the listening materials.

Stage Three: Post-Listening Stage

A)The teacher needs to show the full and accurate written transcripts to the listeners. Then the teacher can ask the learners to read the transcripts by themselves and then reread them with the audio materials to get deeper impression about the text and carry out some remedial work. Simultaneously, the learners may get a practical experience of the native-speakers’speech style.

B)The teacher may relate the listening comprehension activities with writing and speaking activities, such as designing some topics for writing tasks or encouraging learners to make some speeches and reports about listening contents. These activities will help the listeners develop their writing and speaking skills in an active way.

Listening to appropriate authentic and specific materials

In Chinese EFL context, we must recognize that appropriate and sufficient authentic listening materials can become the worthy resources for the learners of language. Therefore, using recorded news broadcasts or movie videos for authentic listening comprehension in EFL classrooms in China are advisable. News reports from many radio stations, such as VOA or BBC, are easily accessible and there is a real reason to listen. Furthermore, watching movie videos can not only develop the learners’listening abilities via acoustic reception, but also provide the opportunities for them to learn about foreign cultures and customs. Apart from the good choices of listening materials, the teacher should confirm the learners’real level in listening, and then decide what kind of listening materials will be put into use.

Positive feedback and evaluation for the listeners

“Providing positive feedback for learners means ensuring that they experience success as often as possible and, if there is failure to understand, diagnosing the cause of the failure so that remedial action can be taken” (Sheerin, 1987, p. 129). If the teachers can always give positive evaluation to the listeners, they will be more self-confident, then the remedial action can be carried out more easily, and the listeners will make more progress instead of losing their hearts.

Conclusion

Listening comprehension ability is very important for every learner of English language. With the improvement of this ability, the learners of English language will make much progress in other three elementary skills as well, and they will develop more self-confidence and communicative capabilities in their English learning process. As has been mentioned and discussed in the former parts of this article, the Chinese learners of English may have some difficulties and problems when they are trying to improve their listening abilities, and they really need the teacher’s scaffoldings with effective teaching approaches. So the effective teaching approaches and skills discussed in this article can be applied for this situation and can help solve their problems. In addition, despite the teacher’s effective assistance in an effective way, the learners still have a long way to go. If the learners have a strong desire to greatly improve their listening abilities, they themselves should listen extensively and frequently, so that they can achieve their goal.