Ａ Ｔａｌｋ ｏｎ Ｌｉｓｔｅｎｉｎｇ Ｓｔｒａｔｅｇｉｅｓ ｉｎ Ｅｎｇｌｉｓｈ Ｌｅａｒｎｉｎｇ

张劲松

Abstract: Among the four main language learning skills, listening has always been the most basic and fundamental. But in China, the training of listening skills in English learning to students is not paid enough attention to. As a result, it is difficult for students to improve their listening ability. This essay involves listening strategies and how to use them in English learning.

Keywords: English learning; listening comprehension; listening strategies

中图分类号： H319文献标识码: A文章编号：1672-1578（2009)5-0016-02

1 Introduction

According to some survey, it has been estimated that of the time spent in communication activities by adults, 45 percent is devoted to listening, 30 percent to speaking, only 16 percent to reading, and a mere 9 percent to writing. The importance of listening can be seen as simple as the common sense that if one does not grasp what is heard, then one has no ground to communicate. Thus, listening comprehension is the prerequisite measure of language proficiency. Yet, developing listening skills is never easy for those who learn a foreign language without going to the foreign countries where the target language is spoken. It takes little insight to see the importance of language environment either as a major barrier of a catalyst in listening comprehension.It seems natural for children to start speaking their mother tongue as soon as they start speaking; it is also common for scholars who spend years learning a foreign language and are able to read and write well yet doing very poorly in oral communication. The difference between the two lies in the language environment as the children are exposed to their mother tongue everyday while the scholars have few opportunities to be challenged by a foreign language environment in which oral communication is a must for daily life. Regarding learning English in China, the situation was particularly true in the past for that listening and speaking English were largely a classroom activity. Lacking such language environment, we see much of the foreign language learning has been focused on reading and writing rather than listening and speaking.

2 Definition of listening and listening comprehension

2.1Listening

In the 1940s and earlier, the main stream of English (as a foreign language) teaching emphasized reading and writing, listening was largely neglected. In the late 1950s and 1960s, listening started to gain some attention yet the scope was still limited to pure linguistic such as identifying the sound making up the words. It was only after the 1970s that considerable changes in listening teaching took place, in which a much broader understanding of listening started to emerge including the very definition of listening itself. One of the definitions is:

Listening is the activity of paying attention to to and trying to get information from something we hear. To listen successfully, we need to be able to work out what speakers mean when they use particular words in particular ways on particular occasions and not simply to understand the word themselves. (Underwood, 1983: 13)

It is worth noting here that a successful listening demands more than understanding the words that have been spoken, implying that special training is needed on how to listen, which is the central concern of listening comprehension.

a) Listening comprehension

With the development of active listening theory, scholars became critically aware that listening comprehension is an active and complex process (OMalley & Chamot: 1990). Various conceptualizations have been developed for better understanding of the complexity of such process. According to OMalley and Chamot, the steps of listening comprehension involve three interrelated processes: perceptual processing, parsing, and utilization. Those processes are recursive in that uninterrupted shifts may occur from the one process to the next and back to pervious process. In perceptual processing, parts of the texts are retained in short-term memory for a few seconds. Listeners may start initial analysis of the language codes and convert some of the text into meaningful mental representations. In parsing, words and phrases are used to construct meaningful mental representations of the text and the propositions are integrated to form a more comprehensive understanding of the text. In utilization, listeners related the mental representation of the text to schema in their long-term memory and process it in a wilder context.

During a single listening event, the process may flow from one into the other, recycle and may be modified based on what occurs in prior or subsequent processes.

3 Listening strategies in English learning

Students do not have an innate understanding of what effective listeners should do; therefore, it is the responsibility of teachers to share that knowledge with them. The most valuable way to teach listening strategies is for the teachers to model them themselves, creating an environment that encourage listening. It is important for the teachers to provide numerous opportunities for students to practice listening strategies and to become actively engaged in the listening process. The three phases of listening process are: pre-listening, while-listening and post-listening.

3.1Pre-listening

Pre-listening is the preparation stage for while-listening. At pre-listening stage, teachers can fulfill three major functions to get learners prepared for the while-listening stage. The first function of pre-listening is to provide context and motivation; and this can be realized by helping learners become conscious of the purpose of or the focus for the upcoming listening input. Therefore, teachers should help listeners narrow down their expectations for the upcoming input and focus their attention on the relevant part so as to lessen the load of listening. This can be done by means of designing some appropriate comprehension questions whose aim is to assist rather than assess listening comprehension.

The second junction of pre-listening is to give full play to learners initiatives by activating their background knowledge. In order to reach the goal, teachers can divide learners into groups to discuss and predict what they are going to listen to with certain clues. In doing so, learners can be motivated and activated to take part in the classroom activities and consequently can stand more chance of becoming active and successful listeners. Naturally, it is also more likely for both teachers and learners to contribute their share to creating an optimal atmosphere in which listeners can feel more relaxed and willing to listen in order to text their prediction.

The third function of pre-listening stage is to provide listeners with necessary sub skill for “micro-listening” to assist their listening. Its desirable that teachers should set aside three or five minutes to train listeners to get familiar with certain important phonological as well as grammatical cues. Therefore, teachers can design some exercises to help ease listeners difficulties in this respect. In a word, pre-listening stage prepare listeners for the while-listening with a purpose, a high motivation, with anticipation as well as necessary sub-skills.

3.2While-listening

With proper preparation at pre-listening stage, listeners

can smoothly move on to while-listening stage with ease and anticipation. During the while-listening stage, listeners should at first be given the time and chance to listen silently and independently. In the course of this period, listeners can listen attentively and continually without any interruption and distraction. This enables them to build up their hypotheses with the help of the carefully designed listening comprehensive questions and allow them to test their predictions they have made at the pre-listening stage on their own. More importantly, by working independently, they are able to realize their problems as where they fail to grasp the key words due to unfamiliarity with certain sounds or where they get puzzled by a sentence, etc.

Generally speaking, teachers should have a clear idea of the possible difficulty-bound parts of the listening materials according to the knowledge of their learners. So they can help listeners make clear their difficulties by pausing at those parts and asking questions that aim to elicit listeners response, such as, “What is just said?” “What is going to be talked about?” By doing so, teachers are more likely to focus on listeners process of listening and can take advantage of such an interaction to help learners work out a solution to their problems by teaching either implicitly or explicitly some useful listening skills or strategies.

On the whole, while-listening is not only a stage to encourage listeners to demonstrate their comprehension and to make their problems plain to the teacher rather than hide them, but also a stage for teachers to teach and help learners build up their listening skills and strategies so as to increase listeners chances in listening tasks. Therefore, while-listening is indeed the most important stage of a listening class, because it is directed at learners listening problems in the process and aims at teaching learners the way to deal with them.

3.3Post-listening

There should be a post-listening stage; learners should be given a learner-learner interaction period, during which they can work cooperatively within small groups to check their prediction and hypotheses by negotiating meaning and exchanging opinions. This is also an important period as it to some extent echoes the pre-listening stage in providing opportunity for listeners to “feedback” and discuss whether their techniques have worked in making the correct predictions.

Furthermore, this also provides opportunity for students to go deeper into the listening text by discussing about the topic of the material. They can learn from each other and enjoy their pleasure in real communication with peers. At the end of this stage, teachers should make sure that necessary feedback to learners performance is offered and received. Learners problems are summarized and tackled by reviewing the difficult parts, and newly taught skills and strategies will be reinforced by encouraging learners to apply them in their out-of-class listening practice. In brief, post-listening not only winds up the current lesson, but also serves as a preliminary introduction to a new lesson.

3.4strategies to combine intensive listening and extensive one

Intensive listening refers to such a kind of listening that when a listener listens, he tries to understand every sentence or even every word of the speech.

Extensive listening means when one listens, he does not have necessarily to understand the meaning of each word or every sentence but just to grasp the general idea of the speech. In real life communication, most of the listening activities refer to the extensive listening. The ability to find out the most important thing in a speech is to convey the main idea or central thought, which is perhaps the most valuable comprehension skill. Without it, the listener gets lost in a mass of details. The biggest problem for the students is that they lack the ability to grasp the general idea in English listening.

During the teaching of the listening comprehension both intensive and extensive listening should be emphasized. The two must be combined tightly.

4 Conclusion

The main objective of this essay is to explore the listening strategies for learners and teachers. The teachers must provide the students with the methods and learning strategies, that is, the teacher should teach not merely knowledge but how to learn.There is a need to develop a more effective teaching method for English teachers so they can be more effective in engaging students and more efficient in meeting the targeted goals that are often used to evaluate the teaching performances. Also, if the listening strategies can be used by students more frequently, it can improve their learning efficiency and lighten their learning burden.

References:

[1]Brown,G. Investigating listening comprehension in context [J]. Applied Linguistics, 1986, (7).

[2]OMalley, M. &Chamot;, A. Learning Strategies in Second Language Acquisition [M]. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.

[3]Underwood, M. Teaching Listening [M]. New York: Longman Inc., 1983.

[4]程晓堂，郑敏. 英语学习策略 [M].北京：外语教学与研究出版社，2002.

[5]刘润清. 论大学英语教学 [M].北京：外语教学与研究出版社，1999.