Improving the Teaching of Listening

Abstract: With more and more emphasis being shifted to

communicative competence, both teachers and students have become aware of the importance of listening as a language skill for communication. However, traditional listening classroom seems to have failed to help learners become effective listeners. Many students often complain that they dont benefit much from listening lessons. This partly explains the unsatisfactory listening ability of the listeners. This article examines the problems of the traditional listening class and puts forward suggestions to improve the teaching of listening.

Introduction
English is learned as a foreign language and opportunities for authentic oral practice and listening are few. As a result students are poor in listening and speaking. When they meet native speakers, they find themselves unprepared for the variety of accents(Cortazzi & Jin, 1996). They find it difficult to understand English if it is spoken at natural , normal speed. They lack confidence about their language competence because they have had inadequate practice in listening and speaking. Recently listening has been giving much attention. However, in reality, many teachers often tend to test listening rather than teach it. Those teachers usually begin with the listening of some passage by introducing some difficult vocabularies. Then they play the tape and ask learners to listen carefully. After that, students are asked to finish comprehension exercises. When learners finish the exercises, teachers check the answers and if they find that students get the wrong answer, they will let the students listen again without any explanation. Students easily get tired of such listening exercises. They are not motivated. Whats worse, learners are very likely to get into bad and harmful listening habits. From the above discussion, we can easily tell how serious the problems are confronting listening teachers. Teachers should reorganize their listening class. And a three-stage format for the listening lesson
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can be designed: pre-listening, while-listening and post-listening.

Pre-listening
Pre-listening is the preparation stage for while-listening. The most important thing in this stage is to provide sufficient context to match what would be available in real life and to create motivation. This can be realized by helping learners become conscious of the purpose of the upcoming listening input. As some researchers claim, listening is always with a purpose or some reason, because listeners are limited processors (Anderson & Lynch, 1988; Brown, 1990). Therefore, teachers should help listeners narrow down their attention for the upcoming input and focus their attention on the relevant part so as to lessen the load of listening. Pre-listening activities can be brainstorming, discussing the topic of the listening text, predicting and pre-teaching vocabulary. This stage should be restricted to a few minutes. Excessive discussion of the topic may mean that too much of the content of the listening passage has been anticipated. Concerning pre-teaching some vocabulary, it may only be necessary for the teacher to present two or three key words without which understanding of the text would be impossible, This will match real life situation, where learners cannot expect to have unknown words explained in advance. [ Another important function of pre-listening is to give full play to learners initiatives by activating their background knowledge. Learners are not passive in their listening, rather, they are active mental builders, always ready to draw inferences and make predictions with the help of their internal resources (Anderson & Lynch, 1988). 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.

While-listening
While-listening should be a stage at which listening is accompanied by carefully designed activities and experience the pleasure of success. Task-based activities are encouraged. Learners are required to finish some tasks with the information they have extracted from the text. Tasks can be labeling, selecting, form-filling or completing a grid. Students
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are thus expressing agreement and disagreement, taking notes, making a picture or a diagram according to instructions. Compared with traditional multiple choice questions, task-based exercises can encourage students to use different kinds of listening skills and strategies to achieve understanding in an active way. Task-based activities of this kind reflect much more closely the type of response that might be given to a listening experience in real life. They also provide a more reliable way of checking understanding and the task of filling forms, labelling diagrams on making choices oblige every learner to try to make something of what they are hearing. Afterwards teachers should provide necessary clues such as contextual information of the speakers of the relationship among speakers, etc to help learners to cope with their problems they come across in the process of listening. 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 of success in listening tasks.

Post-listening
Post-listening is a part that is often neglected by many teachers in China. Actually, there is a lot to do after listening. Activities such as problem solving, summarizing, group discussion and writing as followup are necessary. Instead of spending time examining the grammar of the listening text, we take post-listening as a means of reinforcing recently learned material. If necessary, the teacher can play the while text again and ask the students to compare their understanding of it in pairs or in groups, encourage them to disagree with each other, and increase their motivation for a second listening. After playing the text for the second time, students can revise their views. Instead of telling them who is right and who is wrong, the teacher can ask students to provide evidence to support their views. In this way listening becomes a much more interactive activity. We can also take the chance to let students practice speaking and writing. First they can have discussion and presentation, which at the same time can serve as a pre-writing activity. After sharing ideas, they can write something related to the passage.
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At the end of the 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.

Conclusion
In teaching listening, there are many things that need to be explored. Teaching listening is more than just playing tapes and testing students comprehension. We must realize the ultimate goal of teaching of listening is to help our students to become competent listeners. And the new approach with a combination of pre-listening, while-listening and post-listening is very helpful to contriute to such a goal. Therefore, introduction of such an approach with the three as integrated parts should be made into our listening class. In doing so, we can help our students develop their listening competence along with other abilities and become effective and successful listener both in and out of the classroom.

References
Cortazzi, M. & Jin, L. 1996. State of the Art: English teaching in China. Language Teaching 29: 61-80 Anderson, A & Lynch, T. 1988. Listening. Cambridge: CUP Brown, G. 1990. Listening to Spoken Language. London: Longman