General principles in teaching Listening Comprehension

Contents

INTRODUCTION………………………………………………………………3

I. GENERAL NOTION OF LISTENING COMPREHENSION IN TEACHING ENGLISH

1.1 Listening as a skill.

1.2 General principles in teaching Listening Comprehension.

1.3 Analysis of potential Listening Comprehension problems.

1.4 Listening activities and teaching methods for Listening Comprehension.

II. PRACTICAL USAGE OF LISTENING COMPREHENSION ACTIVITIES.

2.1 Activities and procedures of  Listening Comprehension.

2.2 Suggestions for improvement of English Listening Comprehension.

2.3  Experimental work.

CONCLUSION

BIBLIOGRAPHY

APPENDIX 

                                             Introduction                                                                                                                                           The theme of our course paper is “The Importance of   “ Listening  Comprehension in teaching English”.                                                                                                                                       Topicality:  Listening plays an important role in communication as it is said that, of the total time spent on communicating, listening takes up 40-50%; speaking, 25-30%; reading, 11-16%; and writing, about 9% [3;24]. Although the teaching of listening comprehension has long been ―somewhat neglected and poorly taught aspect of English in many EFL programs, listening is now regarded as much more important in both EFL classrooms and SLA research. Listening involves an active process of deciphering and constructing meaning from both verbal and non-verbal messages. Thus, the label of passive skill applied to listening is a misnomer. This misunderstanding may stem from the fact that superficially learners seem to only sit in a language lab quietly, listen to pre-recorded dialogues, and write the answers to some questions related to the oral stimulus. It is evident, then, that listening is not as passive‘ as it has been claimed to be as it demands a number of complicated processes on the part of the learners. There are two subsuming cognitive processes: bottom-up (data-driven) and top-down (conceptually-driven). The bottom-up processing involves constructing meaning from the smallest unit of the spoken language to the largest one in a linear mode [6;69]. Thus, the learners attempt to understand a spoken discourse by decoding a number of sounds to form words. Next, a nexus of words are linked to form phrases, which make up sentences. These sentences build a complete text, the meaning of which is then constructed by the listeners. In addition to the grammatical relationships, such  suprasegmental phonemes as stress, rhythm and intonation also substantially contribute to this data-driven processing . Learners can be trained to perform this processing, for instance, by activities that require them to discriminate two sounds or distinguish rising and falling intonations. The top-down processing, on the other hand, refers to interpreting meaning as intended by the speakers by means of schemata or structures of knowledge in the mind. This view emphasizes the prominence of background knowledge already possessed by the learners in making sense of the information they hear. In the aural perception, the prior knowledge may facilitate their attempt to grasp the incoming information by relating the familiar with the new one, and significant lack of such knowledge can hamper their efforts to comprehend a particular utterance. It is, therefore, essential that learners are accustomed to performing this processing, usually by extracting the gist of the exchange they listen to. Due to the fact that the communicative approach is increasingly used in EFL situation, we, therefore, stress the importance of  students‘ communicative competence. The need for competence in listening in EFL English language learners is increasing, so that listening teaching has attracted considerable attention. Unfortunately, the teaching of listening skills is still neglected in the English language teaching process. EFL learners have serious problems in English listening comprehension due to the fact that universities pay more attention to English grammar, reading and vocabulary. Listening and speaking skills are not important parts of many course books or curricula and teachers do not seem to pay attention to these skills while designing their lessons. EFL English language learners have limited listening comprehension. Listening levels of learners are different from each other, because listening is affected by crucial factors. The most important factors that should be emphasized are: the significance of listening, the study of listening teaching theory and use of the most advanced listening teaching methods. In many English language classes, grammar-translation method is used for teaching. This method has been found inadequate to the demands for producing efficient English speakers and listeners. So a new teaching method should be used to meet the needs of students. This new method is called communicative approach. English must be taught as a tool for communication. It is now widely accepted that students‘ listening ability must be at the core of teaching practice, and it is the area in which teachers need to concentrate their own efforts to improve their teaching. This is a significant challenge for English teachers; however, it is crucial in the development of English language communicative competence. The purpose of this approach is to improve the  students‘ English overall linguistic capability and oral and aural competence. The researchers attempt to discuss the definition of listening, importance of listening. Then, they review the process of listening comprehension, strategies of listening comprehension. Analysis of listening comprehension problems is reviewed. Then, teaching methods for listening comprehension and teaching listening activities will be discussed. Finally, general principles in teaching listening comprehension are discussed. Findings of this study will be beneficial to EFL learners to improve their English language listening comprehension ability.                                                                                                                                                           Aims: the aim is to give theoretical and practical argumentation of the necessity of Listening comprehension to provide effective classroom learning.

         Objectives:

• To state the importance of  Listening Comprehension;
• To describe the necessity of Listening Comprehension;
• To identify the problems in  Listening Comprehension;
• To list the types of activities in  Listening Comprehension.

        Object: The use of  Listening Comprehension as the means of effective classroom learning.

Subject: the use of the most effective and frequently applied listening activities . The problem:  There are a lot of problems connected with Listening Comprehension such as, pupils cannot control how quickly a  speaker  speaks  and  they cannot always have the words repeated. These are the main problems of our research.

Hypothesis: Effective teaching cannot be ensured without listening comprehension. By paying more attention to listening comprehension teachers of foreign language will achieve great success and will get the better results in language may be expected.                      

The basis of investigation is the school named after A.Aitiev.

The methods of investigation:  analysis  of scientific, theoretical, methodological and educational literature on the problem of investigation; observation of the process of teaching  Listening Comprehension, research experiment.

The theoretical value: the presented material may be useful for teachers and students researching the problem of teaching Listening Comprehension.

The practical value: the tasks and activities and effective methods and techniques, the suggestions and guidelines on teaching Listening Comprehension given in the practical part of the course paper will be effective tools for teachers of English at school.

The structure of our course paper consists of Introduction, two chapters, Conclusion, Bibliography. The first chapter is devoted to the methodological and pedagogical aspects of teaching Listening Comprehension as well as to the  psychological  features  of  EFL  learners. The second chapter consists of the various creative and effective methods successfully used during our practical experience  at  school  named  after  A.Aitiev.    In  the conclusion we point out and resume the results of our investigation. Then comes bibliography, which   followed by the appendix.

I. GENERAL NOTION OF LISTENING COMPREHENSION IN TEACHING ENGLISH

1.1 Listening as a skill.

According to Anderson and Lynch , arguing what is successful listening, ―understanding is not something that happens because of what a speaker says: the listener has a crucial part to play in the process, by activating various types of knowledge, and by applying what he knows to what he hears and trying to understand what the speaker means. Underwood simplified the definition of listening to "the activity of paying attention to and trying to get meaning from something we hear" .  Mendelsohn  defines listening comprehension as ―the ability to understand the spoken language of native speakers.'' O‘Malley, Chamot, and  Kupper offer a useful and more extensive definition that ―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. Mendelsohn  points out that, in listening to spoken language, the ability to decipher the speaker‘s intention is required of a competent listener, in addition to other abilities such as processing the linguistic forms like speech speed and fillers, coping with listening in an interaction, understanding the whole message contained in the discourse, comprehending the message without understanding every word, and recognizing different genres. Listeners must also know how to process and how to judge what the illocutionary force of an utterance is- that is, what this string of sounds is intended to mean in a particular setting, under a particular set of circumstances – as an act of real communication [2;19]. Purdy defined listening as "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". Listening comprehension is an inferential process. Linguistic knowledge and world knowledge interact as listeners create a mental representation of what they hear. Bottom up and top down processes are applied to get to this mental representation and achieve comprehension. Rost defined listening as a process of receiving what the speaker actually says, constructing and representing meaning, negotiating meaning with the speaker and responding, and creating meaning through involvement, imagination and empathy. To listen well, listeners must have the ability to decode the message, the ability to apply a variety of strategies and interactive processes to make meaning, and the ability to respond to what is said in a variety of ways, depending on the purpose of the communication. Listening involves listening for thoughts, feelings, and intentions. Doing so requires active involvement, effort and practice [7;89]. To sum up, it is widely admitted that listening comprehension is not merely the process of a unidirectional receiving of audible symbols, but an interactive  process . In the eight processes of comprehension [9;11] the hearer, after receiving the information, assigns a literal meaning to the utterance first and then assigns an intended meaning to the utterance. A key to human communication is the ability to match perceived meaning with intended meaning.                                                                        Listening is the most frequently used language skill. Bird found that female college students spent 42 percent of their total verbal communication time in listening while they spent 25 percent in speaking, 15 percent in reading, and 18 percent in writing. A study conducted by Barker, Edwards, Gaines, Gladney, and Holley confirmed Bird's view of the primacy of listening and showed that the portion of verbal communication time spent by college students was 52.5 percent in listening, 17.3 percent in reading, 16.3 percent in speaking, and 13.9 percent in writing. According to Devine, listening is the primary means by which incoming ideas and information are taken in Gilbert, on the other hand, noted that students from kindergarten through high school were expected to listen 65-90 percent of the time. Wolvin and Coakley concluded that, both in and out of the classroom, listening consumes more of daily communication time than other forms of verbal communication. Listening is central to the lives of students throughout all levels of educational development. Listening is the most frequently used language skill in the classroom. Both instructors  and students acknowledge the importance of listening comprehension for success in academic settings. Numerous studies indicated that efficient listening skills were more important than reading skills as a factor contributing to academic success. However, Dunkel's study reported that international students' academic success in the United States and Canada relied more on reading than listening comprehension, especially for those students in engineering, psychology, chemistry, and computer science. Thus, the importance of listening in classroom instruction has been less emphasized than reading and writing. Nevertheless, it is evident that listening plays a significant role in the lives of people. Listening is even more important for the lives of students since listening is used as a primary medium of learning at all stages of education.

1.2 General principles in teaching Listening Comprehension.

Listening comprehension lessons must have definite goals, carefully stated. These goals should fit into the overall curriculum, and both teacher and students should be clearly cognizant of what they are.

1. Listening comprehension lessons should be constructed with careful step by step planning. This implies, that the listening tasks progress from simple to more complex as the student gains in language proficiency; that the student knows exactly what the task is and is given directions as to - what to listen for, where to listen, when to listen, and how to listen.''

2. Listening comprehension  lesson structure should demand active overt student participation. The ―most overt student participation involves his written response to the Listening comprehension material,'' and that immediate feedback on performance helps keep interest and motivation at high levels.

3.Listening comprehension lesson should provide a communicative urgency for remembering in order to develop concentration. This urgency, which along with concentration is a key factor in remembering, should come not from the teacher, but from the lesson itself. This is done by giving the students the writing assignment before they listen to the material.

4. Listening comprehension lessons should stress conscious memory work. One of the goals of listening is to strengthen the students‘ immediate recall in order to increase their memory spans. ''Listening is receiving, receiving requires thinking, and thinking requires memory; there is no way to separate listening, thinking, remembering.''

5. Listening comprehension lessons should ―teach, not ―test. This means that the purpose of checking the students‘ answers should be viewed only as feedback, as a way of letting the students‘ find out how they did and how they are progressing. There should be no pass/fail attitude associated with the correction of the exercises [3,125].

1.3 Analysis of potential Listening Comprehension problems.

Underwood states seven causes of obstacles to efficient listening comprehension. First, listeners cannot control the speed of delivery. He says,'' Many English language learners believe that the greatest difficulty with listening comprehension is that the listener cannot control how quickly a speaker speaks'' [11;48]. Second, listeners cannot always have words repeated. This is a serious problem in learning situations. In the classroom, the decision as to whether or not to replay a recording or a section of a recording is not in the hands of students. Teachers decide what and when to repeat listening passages; however, it is hard for the teacher to judge whether or not the students have understood any particular section of what they have heard [3,126]. Third, listeners have a limited vocabulary. The speaker may choose words the listener does not know. Listeners sometimes encounter an unknown word which may cause them to stop and think about the meaning of that word and thus cause them to miss the next part of the speech. Fourth, listeners may fail to recognize the signals which indicate that the speaker is moving from one point to another, giving an example, or repeating a point. Discourse markers used in formal situations or lectures such as ''secondly,'' or ''then'' are comparatively evident to listeners. In informal situations or spontaneous conversations, signals are more vague as in pauses, gestures, increased loudness, a clear change of pitch, or different intonation patterns. These signals can be missed especially by less proficient listeners. Fifth, listeners may lack contextual knowledge. Sharing mutual knowledge and common content makes communication easier. Even if listeners can understand the surface meaning of the text, they may have considerable difficulties in comprehending the whole meaning of the passage unless they are familiar with the context. Nonverbal clues such as facial expressions, nods, gestures, or tone of voice can also be easily misinterpreted by listeners from different cultures. Sixth, it can be difficult for listeners to concentrate in a foreign language. In listening comprehension, even the shortest break in attention can seriously impair comprehension. Conversation is easier when students find the topic of the listening passage interesting; however, students sometimes feel listening is very tiring even if they are interested because it requires an enormous amount of effort to follow the meaning. Seventh, students may have established certain learning habits such as a wish to understand every word. Teachers want students to understand every word they hear by repeating and pronouncing words carefully, by grading the language to suit their level, by speaking slowly and so on. As a result, they tend to become worried if they fail to understand a particular word or phrase and they will be discouraged by the failure. It is necessary for students to tolerate vagueness and incompleteness of understanding.

1.4 Listening activities and teaching methods for Listening Comprehension.

Listening is a highly-complex solving activities [5;15] in which listeners interact with a speaker to construct meaning, within the context of their experiences and knowledge. When students are made aware of the factors that affect listening, the levels of listening, and the components of the listening process, they are more likely to recognize their own listening abilities and engage in activities that prepare them to be effective listeners. Karakas states that listening activities try to prevent failure so that they can support the learner‘s interpretation of the text. Listening activities are usually subcategorized as pre-listening, while-listening, and post-listening activities.

A. Pre-listening Activities

Schema theory provides strong evidence for the effectiveness of pre-listening activities which includes the outline for listening to the text and teaching cultural key concepts. Listening teacher may select certain words, difficult grammatical structures and expressions to be explained through the discussion about the topic , and may also ask students to predict the content or what speakers are going to say, based on the information they have already got. Pre-listening activities usually have two primary goals: (a) to help to activate students‘ prior knowledge, build up their expectations for the coming information; and (b) to provide the necessary context for the specific listening task. The teacher could follow with a listening comprehension activity, such as two people having a conversation about their daily life. Students must answer true or false questions based on the previous listening activity. An example of a controlled practice activity could be a drill activity that models the same structure or vocabulary [5;24].                                                     B. While -listening  Activities                                                                                          Listeners who participate actively in the listening experience are more likely to construct clear and accurate meaning as they interpret the speaker‘s verbal message and nonverbal cues. During the listening experience students verify and revise their predictions. They make interpretations and judgments based on what they heard. Listening teacher may ask students to note down key words to work out the main points of the text. Students answer comprehension questions while listening to the text and select specific information to complete the table provided with the text. While-listening activities usually have some of the following purposes: to focus students‘ comprehension of the speaker‘s language and ideas; to focus students‘ attention on such things as the speaker‘s organizational patterns; to encourage students‘ critical reactions and personal responses to the speaker‘s ideas and use of language. An open-ended activity could follow that allows students to have the freedom to practice listening comprehension in the class about their daily life and asking for further information. Listening comprehension should begin with what students already know so that they can build on their existing knowledge and skills with activities designed on the same principle. A variation on the - filling in the missing word listening activity could be to use the same listening materials, but to set a pair work activity where student A and student B have the same worksheet where some information items are missing.                                                             C. Post-listening Activities Post-listening activities are important because they extend students‘ listening skill. Post-listening activities are most effective when done immediately after the listening experience. Well-planned post-listening activities offer students opportunities to connect what they have heard to their own ideas and experiences, and encourage interpretive and critical listening and reflective thinking. As well, post-listening activities provide opportunities for teachers to assess and check students‘ comprehension, and clarify their understandings; to extend comprehension beyond the literal level to the interpretive and critical levels. Different comprehension questions can be assigned for students to discuss after listening, students then swap information to complete the ―whole class chart, correlating what each student has heard to arrive at the big picture. If there are any questions that remain unanswered during the first or second listening, and after the information swap activity, the whole class can listen to the tape again. The students will then try to find the answer to the questions that have not been previously understood, rather than the teacher providing the answers straight away [5;79].                                                                                                         Teaching methods for Listening comprehension. Some of the teaching methods for improving students' listening comprehension skill are as follows:

A. Cultivating Students’ Listening Skills

Cultivating students‘ listening skills is one of the most difficult tasks for any EFL teacher. This is because successful listening skills are acquired over time and with lots of practice. The demands of the task are often frustrating for students because there are no precise rules, as in grammar teaching. Speaking and writing also have very specific exercises that can lead to improvement. However, there are quite specific ways of improving listening skills but these are difficult to quantify. Teachers must develop students‘ micro skills of listening comprehension. Brown  identifies seventeen listening comprehension micro skills. Some of the more important of these skills are discussed here. For beginners, the most important listening skill is discrimination in English pronunciation, intonation and language flow. They need to acquire the crucial skill of identifying the main information. Wu Zhengfu recognizes that when students acquire basic discrimination ability, they can select and analyze the meaning of what they hear and grasp the main content. In the teaching process teachers should cultivate students‘ ability to select main information and instruct students to control the general meaning of listening materials on the whole. In class, for example, teachers can ask students to listen to the general meaning of the passage, and to sum up key points and main information. Predictive ability is also an extremely important listening micro skill. In everyday communication, people continually make unconscious predictions about what speakers will say, and these predictions are made on the basis of their knowledge of the context in which the communication is made. The development of predictive ability has many aspects. Before listening training, teachers might ask students questions related to listening materials, or introduce relevant background knowledge to enlighten students‘ thinking to allow students a clear recognition of the goals and requirements of listening training. The ability to guess the meaning of words is also an important listening micro skill. Listening comprehension does not mean understanding every word, but some words do play a crucial part in listening comprehension. It is a normal phenomenon not to understand every word that is uttered. However, students may guess the meaning of new words on the basis of the topic being discussed and gain some understanding of the probable linguistic items on the basis of the context of discourses, the grammatical structure and the background knowledge of the topic.

B. Textbook-based Learning and Other Listening Contexts

Listening lessons require listeners to concentrate on the content and make fast responses to what is heard. If students are passive and apprehensive during listening training, they will probably feel nervous and wary of taking chances. Teachers need to take a non-punitive approach and structure lessons that are varied, vivid and interesting. Teachers need to select a wide range of materials to increase listening content besides using textbooks. Students need to listen to different levels of English in order to be exposed to natural, lively, rich language, such as listening to English songs, seeing films with English text. In these ways it is possible to raise students‘ enthusiasm, cultivate their listening interests, and achieve the goals of learning English.

C. Passing on Cultural Knowledge in Language Teaching

Understanding that language is controlled by particular cultural experiences is a necessity for the language learner. If the cultural differences between the students‘ own culture and that of the language they are to learn is excessive, learners will usually keep some distance from the target language in their efforts to maintain their psychological comfort level. As a consequence the operating processes of memory and input will certainly be limited [1;22]. Thus teachers need to be aware that breaking down the barriers is a significant part of cultural teaching and forms an important aspect of the whole process of language teaching. The aspect of cultural knowledge transmission is an equal part of language improvement and development of work in listening development has the potential for achieving a powerful influence on the formulation of students‘ thinking habits and the application of foreign language expressions. Cultural teaching, then, has direct and concrete influences on intercultural communication. When students gain an intimate knowledge of the culture of the target language they begin to understand how the language is used to reflect the thoughts, behaviors and customs of that society. In teaching English listening, teachers need to develop students‘ consciousness about intercultural communication and they need to energize students‘ capacity for wanting to engage with a different culture. Great care needs to be taken when selecting listening material and auxiliary texts, since these are a crucial aspect of the cultural factors in listening teaching. The selection of material related to British and American cultural background knowledge is of particular importance, since these tend to be the focus of much of the classroom time when students‘ thinking ability and intercultural awareness is being cultivated.

D. Combining “Intensive Listening” with “Extensive Listening”; Focusing on Listening

Intensive listening requires students to understand the meaning of each discourse and, ultimately, to understand every sentence and word. Generally, intensive listening requires students to listen to a text several times, or divide the text into paragraphs and sentences to understand each one; or by doing dictation word by word. The goal is for students to understand every sentence. Alternatively, extensive listening does not require students to understand every sentence, and every word, instead, students are encouraged to grasp the general meaning of the passage. The key point of

listening is to understand the content. The purpose of intensive listening is to build basic listening skills, while extensive listening is to strengthen and enlarge effectiveness of intensive listening in order to improve overall listening ability. In listening teaching, both intensive and extensive listening should be combined with cultivating students‘ basic skills, the development of the productive listening habits of active thinking and the ability to understand the text. Therefore, teachers must encourage students to engage in intensive listening in class, requiring students to understand the general meaning and also to become familiarized with English pronunciation, intonation and the changes in language flow. In activities outside the class students need to engage in extensive listening; listening to many different variety of language phenomena and gaining more knowledge through TV programs, radio, the Internet and as many other kinds of exposure to listening training they can find. Exposure to demands of listening should include aspects of everyday life, science and technology, and academic lectures. Teachers must create language-learning environments that stimulate students‘ interests and raise students‘ passion and enthusiasm for learning English.

E. Combining Listening with Other Skills

According to language acquisition theory, human capacity for discrimination between language intention and language content is a crucial step in the language acquisition process. Thus listening comprehensive ability plays an important role in acquisition and improvement of language skills. Therefore, in listening teaching, there is a need to combine the development of listening ability with the development of other skills such as reading. In order to improve listening ability it is necessary to listen frequently to a teacher reading well, since it is very difficult to generate a high quality output without appropriate input. Secondly, students need to practice reading aloud among themselves. By such activity students will learn to combine the act of listening with reading. Students must be actively engaged in producing language of high quality if they are to improve their English proficiency levels. Similarly, by combining listening with writing, teachers can divide the work into two parts. First, students might answer teachers‘ questions in written English after listening to spoken language material. It is also important to remember that good listening entails recalling the essence of the material rather than the precise detail. Thirdly, teachers should combine listening activities with speaking in ways that bring out the basics of oral communication. Inevitably, listeners will lose the information resources without speaking; speaking will lose its objective without careful listening and, as a result, speaking ability will not be acquired. Listening and speaking rely on each other and regulate each other. It is important to strengthen listening through speaking and to improve speaking through listening. Students need to retell and discuss the material they have just heard in order to synthesize their understanding. In this way they learn to combine listening with speaking properly. Students who are able to do this are able to overcome their passive response to the situation and gradually they learn to feel safe when they respond. In order for this to happen, a truly interactive and penalty free listening class is required. Teacher/student and students/student exchanges should be emphasized as opportunities for a free exchange of opinions when participants can consolidate their listening approaches and skills during the process of communication. Through a variety of listening-reading, listening-writing and listening-speaking activities, students can not only strengthen their language skills but also sharpen their interests and raise their motivation to improve their learning efficiency.

II. PRACTICAL USAGE OF LISTENING COMPREHENSION.

2.1 Activities and procedures of  Listening Comprehension.

1. ‘Exposure’ listening.                                                                                                               The material for this will consist mainly of:                                                                           (a)  Stories, anecdotes, jokes, talks, commentaries (i. e. with one speaker only). Most learners need practice in listening to material with a single speaker only, so that they do not have the added difficulty of trying to identify the speakers when they cannot see them. The material may be recorded or improvised by the teacher.           (b)  Conversations, discussions, plays (i. e. with more than one speaker)                        The students will need to be given some background e. g. about the speakers. For plays they may actually need to follow the written text.                                                          (c)  Songs (both traditional and pop)                                                                                         These provide a good form of listening because the students are generally very much concerned to make out the words .                                                                                              (d)  Videos and films                                                                                                           Clearly there is great advantage in using wherever possible recorded material where the students can see what is happening (even if it is only two people talking) as well as listen.                                                                                                                         2. Task listening                                                                                                                       The number of possible activities here is virtually limitless, although it is intended that the list below cover key areas.                                                                                           (a)  Ear-training                                                                                                                     In distinguishing between key sounds, stress and intonation patterns. Most learners need, enjoy and will benefit from activities, which will help to improve their receptive ability in these areas, especially if they are presented in a game-like way.                  (b)  Game-like activities                                                                                                 “Simon says” and variations on the game of ‘Bingo’ are effective ways of getting learners to respond to instructions, listen out for specific items and so on. Many language games depend for their success on students listening .                                                     (c)  Instructions                                                                                                            Activities such as picture dictation, where the students have to draw a picture which the teacher (or another student) talks about without showing them; completing a map or picture; following a route on the map in order to arrive at a particular place; arranging objects (e. g. pictures on an outline scene), involve careful listening without requiring a verbal response (unless the listeners ask for clarification).                                                                                                                            (d)  Completion-type activities                                                                                              For these the students have an incomplete version of a story, a description or a song (words, phrases or sentences omitted) which they have to complete either while they listen or afterwards.                                                                                          (e)  Identifying mistakes or contradictions                                                                                For example an object (thing, person or place - either real or in pictorial form) is described and the students have to listen and note down any mistakes. Similarly a text (a story or description) containing internal contradictions can be used for the same purpose.                                                                                                                         (f)  Finding differences                                                                                                           The students hear, for example, two versions of a story or two accounts of an event and have to identify the points of difference.                                                                            (g)  Problem-solving.                                                                                                                    For example, the students are shown pictures of 3-4 people, places, events and listen to one of these being described. Their task is to decide which item is being talked about. Students may also be asked to categorise on a worksheet items mentioned in a conversation or discussion.                                                                              (h)  Extracting information.                                                                                                This is one of the commonest types of listening tasks. For this the students will probably need a chart of some kind, which they have to fill in according to specific instructions. For example, if they are listening to a broadcast they may be asked to note down the main topics or, on an easier level, decide in what order they occur in the talk. For tasks, which involve extracting information, it is often desirable to define the role of the listener so that he has a clear purpose for carrying out the task listening material comprehension English.                                                                                    3. Listening as a stimulus to other activities                                                                                            The activities in this section are specially designed to lead on to activities involving other skills.                                                                                                                (e)  Jigsaw listening                                                                                                             As its name implies, the basic mechanism underlying this activity is that the information needed to complete a task (such as attending a meeting) has been shared out between 3-4 groups in the class. Each group listens to its own piece of recorded material and notes down on a worksheet the information available. The groups then combine to pool their information.                                                                             (f)  Ambiguous conversations                                                                                           The students hear a short conversation (or an extract from a long conversation), which provides very few clues as to what the speakers are talking about. The students themselves have to decide who the speakers are, where they are, what they are talking about, and, possibly, what will happen next. This type of listening then, leads on naturally to discussion (and, if desired, writing).                                                                   (g)  Decision-making                                                                                                        The students are given some information e. g. about a town (places of interest, facilities etc.) in the form of a talk or conversation, on the basis of which they have to plan a visit. The planning involves discussion and note making. Decision-making activities can also involve, for example, making choices between places, events, activities, for which the background information is made available in recorded form.                                                                                                                            (h)  Pre-reading activity.                                                                                                        The students hear, for example, a conversation about the Loch Ness Monster, as a stimulus to listen to an article or book on the subject. Similarly they can be asked to listen to short reports on books before deciding which one they want to read.                      (i)  Pre-writing activity.                                                                                                            This can be in the form of a communication game. One student describes a picture, which the others in the group are not allowed to see. The students who are listening make notes (and can also ask questions if they want more information). They then use these notes to write a description of the picture .                                                                                 4. Interactive listening                                                                                                             Most interactive listening situations are in the form of discussions and games. Two important points need to be kept in mind. First, these activities form the basis of oral work, where the emphasis is on getting the learners to use language for self expression. It should not be forgotten, however, that listening is an important aspect of these activities. The learners have to listen in order to participate. Secondly, although these activities are normally done in groups, in order to give the students themselves as many opportunities as possible to use language, we should also look for suitable opportunities to interact with the class as a whole, through conversation, discussion and games. This must be regarded as a significant component of the listening comprehension programme.                                                (a)  Discussion-type activities                                                                                                  These provide   good listening practice because they get students to listen to one another, especially if the discussion is geared toward making a decision of some kind. For such activities the student have to listen to one another in order to participate.                                                                                                                                    (b)  Predictive listening                                                                                                         For this activity a text is read aloud sentence-by-sentence. The students are asked to interpret the sentence and to predict what they think will follow. As the text builds up, they can revise their interpretations. Although this is a contrived activity, it encourages very careful listening both to the text itself and to the various interpretations suggested.                                                                                                        (c)  Communication games                                                                                                Many communication games provide excellent practice. For example, Describe and draw where the listeners, whose task is to draw the picture being described, interact with the speaker in order to elicit more information complete it is based on the jigsaw principle. In this case, however, the information is divided up visually among the participants, who have to talk and ask questions in order to build up the complete story. Games, which involve the evaluation of a player’s performance, such as, Use it, also provide purposeful listening practice .                                                                   (d)  Interviews.                                                                                                                         The students can be asked to design questionnaires or surveys, which they use to interview one another or people outside the classroom. Interviewing of this kind involves careful listening and recording of answers .                                                5. Listening material.                                                                                                                         The usage of the authentic listening material is one of the problems in the teaching listening comprehension. The important point, as always, is to meet the needs of the learners. On the short-term basis the learners need to listen to material, which allows them to feel comfortable, perhaps because it is mainly recycling known language. In addition to this, particularly taking their long-term needs into account, the learners have to be exposed to listening material, which is beyond their productive level. Whether this is ‘authentic’ in the early stages is not entirely relevant provided the material gets them used to not understanding every word; encourages them to guess - and, over and above this, stimulates them to talk (or read or write, if these are following-up activities). But, of course, whenever possible, some authentic material should be used, and on an increasing scale as the course progresses. However, it must be kept in mind that the use of authentic material for listening is very different from reading, where, because the learners can work individually and at their own pace, authentic material carries fewer risks. In the typical listening situation, care has to be taken to see that learners are not discouraged by excessive difficulties. In general, authentic materials are best used where the learners themselves are likely to appreciate them and accept them in spite of difficulties.                                                                                                                                      6. Listening comprehension tests                                                                                                   An effective way of developing the listening skill is through the provision of carefully selected practice material. Such material is in many ways similar to that used for testing listening comprehension. Although the auditory skills are closely linked to the oral skills in normal speech situations, it may sometimes be useful to separate the two skills for teaching and testing, since it is possible to develop listening ability much beyond the range of speaking and writing ability if the practice material is not dependent on spoken responses and written exercises. An awareness of the way in which the spoken language differs from the written language is of crucial importance in the testing of the listening skills. For example, the spoken language is much more complex than the written language in certain ways, as a result of the large element of ‘redundancy’ that it contains. Such features of redundancy make it possible for mutilated messages to be understood. Furthermore, the human brain has a limited capacity for the reception of information and it would often be impossible to absorb information at the speed at which it is conveyed through ordinary speech. Such conversational features as repetition, hesitation and grammatical re-patterning are all examples of this type of redundancy. What is the significance of these features for testing purposes? Firstly, the ability to distinguish between phonemes, however important, does not in itself imply an ability to understand verbal messages. Moreover, occasional confusion over selected pairs of phonemes does not matter too greatly because in real-life situations listeners are able to use contextual clues to interpret what they hear. Secondly, impromptu speech is usually easier to understand than carefully prepared (written) material when the latter is read aloud. Written tests generally omit many of the features of redundancy and impart information at a much higher rate than normal speech does. Consequently, it is essential to make provision for restating important points, rewriting and rephrasing them when writing material for aural tests.                                                                                                                                      

2.2 Suggestions for improvement of English Listening Comprehension.                     A. Suggestions on Teaching                                                                                                           1. Listening approach

When students need to use their prior knowledge to interpret the text and to create plausible expectations of what they are about to hear, they will activate knowledge-based processing. On the other hand, they also need to decode the linguistic input rapidly and accurately and to map the input against these expectations to confirm consistencies and to refute implausible interpretations which are referred to as text-based processing. It is acknowledged that listening strategies should be integrated explicitly and treated pedagogically to improve listening ability.

2. Classroom procedure

2. 1. Preparing students to listen

Students can make use of analogy to predict and interpret language with past similar experiences. They have a range of schemata knowledge about particular people, places, situations and text-types which they can call up and use as points of comparison with what is currently being heard and experienced. Prediction is an important process in English listening. EFL learners use their perception of the key features of context and their knowledge of the world to limit the range of possible utterances they are about to hear. This ability helps students to process the message for deviations from what was expected, reducing their memory load in order to monitor the incoming message more efficiently. At the beginning stage, it is the teachers‘ task to guide students to gradually develop how to predict from the known information of the text. Visual support and transcript are two important sources of support to students. In the form of pictures, graphs, diagrams, maps, etc., the visual support can help students to predict incoming listening materials easily by supplying cultural information. It can provide support by reinforcing the aural message and training them to listen to some difficult specific information. To some students, what is heard is kind of ―sound or ―noise instead of meaningful information and they are very reluctant to pay attention to the overall message but understand every single word. For these reasons a transcript is valuable for it allows students to go back after the initial attempt so that they can check to make sure they can hear and understand everything, increasing their interest and confidence in further listening.

2. 2. Providing students with positive feedback

Providing positive feedback for students means ensuring an experience of success, which helps remove the mental block of the type discussed by  Krashen. In contrast, repeated failure can result in a panic and a real psychological barrier to effective listening. If there is a failure for understanding, diagnosing the cause of the failure is so important that remedial action can be taken. Neglecting the failure for a moment is unreasonable for it pushes students to slide into confusion and even into further failure.

3. Raising meta-cognitive awareness

Students are capable of observing their own cognitive processes in their listening and also verbalizing their theories about learning to listen in English. The listening notes by students and pre-listening and post-listening discussions are very helpful in this sense. These activities are very useful by involving students in thinking, not just about the content of listening, but more importantly, about the process of listening. By doing so, they can have chances to share with one another‘s thoughts and strategies so that they can improve their own listening ability. More importantly, they will be aware of what leads to their success and failure and then work out their own effective strategies in listening.

B. Suggestions on Textbooks and Teacher’s Books

(1) Teacher‘s books should introduce some information about theories on listening training, so that teachers can base their teaching on these necessary theories. The information can cover the nature of listening, such as information processing, listening strategies, problems students may face, and how to solve them.

(2) Listening teaching should be a student-training program covering all listening strategies identified to be involved in listening, which should be systematic. Detailed information of the strategies to be practiced should be given for both teachers‘ benefits and students‘ benefits. Suggestions about how to teach each strategy should be as complete as possible, so that even new teachers can have a good lesson plan.

(3) Discourse processing should be encouraged from the very beginning, which is also the way students naturally process a listening text. So the first thing students are asked to do with a text should be to consider it as a whole. Then, exercises can gradually involve more detailed comprehension by analyzing the text to a greater depth.

(4) Textbooks and teacher‘s books should provide or at least suggest a framework of activities which are integrated with listening strategies: pre-listening, while-listening and post-listening. As the words pre-listening, while-listening and post-listening show, they are to be performed at three different stages in the classroom teaching of a listening text. Pre-listening activities can be subdivided into ―readiness activities and ―guidance activities. Readiness activities aim at activating students‘ prior knowledge by reading the title, new words of the text, sometimes by looking at the pictures given before the exercises in textbooks, and also by asking provocative questions or introducing some background knowledge. Guidance activities are intended to guide students‘ attention to specific aspects of language input by letting them bear certain purposes in mind in advance, that is to say, letting students know what task or tasks they are going to do with the text, or letting students themselves decide what they want to do with the text. As these exercises are designed for students to practice certain strategies, at the beginning stage, teachers should present students with the value and purpose of these strategies, and teach them how to use the strategies and monitor their own use as one part of guidance activities. In the second stage of classroom teaching, while-listening activities are designed for students to practice those strategies considered beneficial when actually receiving acoustic input, and to help to develop a good habit of actively participating in the understanding process instead of just passively receiving what is coming into the ears. At the beginning of strategy training, one activity usually focuses on one strategy so that students can have a good practice of this certain strategy and make full use of it in listening. As time goes by, activities are then designed to integrate with these strategies. By constant controlled practice with strategies integrated with one listening activity, students will gradually have an effective automatic processing of being able to listen to texts by using various listening strategies, and will thus greatly improve their listening ability. The final stage of teaching a text involves post-listening activities, which cover two kinds of activities: ―comprehension activities and evaluation activities. Comprehension activities focus on checking understanding of English itself and interpretation of the text. Students are asked to do some question-oriented exercises, which test students‘ comprehension and memory, and the questions are usually offered by textbooks. Evaluation activities aim at developing students‘ self-evaluation strategy in order to make them more efficient listeners. In order to let students have a chance to practice oral English in a functional situation, we can have one more kind of post-listening activities: production activities, which are intended to promote students oral ability.

2.3 Experimental work.

I spent my teaching practice at school named after Abdrahman Aitiev .  During my practice I tried to develop listening skills and in the way of developing it I used teaching methods for listening comprehension such as Cultivating pupils` listening skills, Textbook – based learning and other listening contexts, passing on cultural knowledge in language teaching, Combining “Intensive listening” with “Extensive listening” and Combining listening with other skills. For the first time we had a lot of problems. The main problem was that the school where I spent my teaching practice had not any  language laboratories. And of course, listening was new for them and they had difficulties in listening. But then we consulted with other English teachers and we decided to buy a tape – recorder.  After  I  began my experiment. I chose the 6^th grade. There were 12 pupils. 8 of them was male and 4 was female. They all were in good condition  i.e  they had not any problems in hearing. At first I gave them easy tasks in order to know their degree on listening. In spite of easiness of the task pupils could not cope with it. Thus I did an observation. Then I spent a lot of time in practicing  their  listening  so, reconstructed them.  The tasks were more difficult than the first tasks. Like add   some more information, write true or false and so on. I took these exercises from the Ayapova. When I gave them the  tasks  I did pre-listening, while-listening and post-listening activities. These activities helped both to me and to pupils. We had a purpose and it made our experiment easier. In the conclusion I used an exercise like a game.  In these step my pupils could cope with the task and I attained my aim.

1step “Observation” The  text  “Gardening in England”. 6^th grade.

2 step “Reconstruction” the dialogue between Colin and Andrew.

3 step “Conclusion”  “a guessing game”

The final results

                                       CONCLUSION

           We have outlined the main reasons for teaching listening comprehension in a foreign language. It is now widely accepted that oral communication plays a vital role in second language teaching for it provides an exposure to language which is a fundamental requirement for the learner. Progress in listening guarantees a basis for development of other language skills. Spoken language provides a means of interaction where participation is a significant component of the listening  programme.                                                                                                                                        We have provided a methodological organization of the listening comprehension process and we have discussed the principles of developing receptive skills of the learner. All subtypes of listening provide a natural progression from activities that entail minimal verbal interaction to those that involve a maximum of interaction. The goal of any activity is to provide the optimal challenge for the students. Since learners’ listening abilities vary, teachers should note how the activities could be adapted to the learners’ capabilities.

In showing a considerable variety of listening activities we have explored some of the many ways to help students acquire the confidence to use their skills for self-expression in language situations. Different activities and procedures provide the development of the listening for communicative tasks and for extracting general or certain specific points in the discourse.

We have discussed the use of authentic listening material and stressed the need for authentic-like texts at different levels. The teachers and students may encounter some difficulties not only in the reliability of the listening material, but also in the quality of English language media (TV and radio broadcasts, audio and videotapes, records) with the help of which listening material is presented. The important point is to satisfy the learners’ requirements and to involve their abilities to understand and reproduce the given material.

We have stressed the importance of careful selection of practice material for testing listening skills of the learners. It is necessary to construct different types of practical exercises for students to experience language. Listening comprehension tests present an effective method for developing listening abilities.

                                          BIBLIOGRAPHY

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