Listening Comprehension at the Beginner S Level

Listening Comprehension at the beginner’s level 041025 Midori Katayama

Introduction Listening is very important when the students study second languages. However, the opportunity to expose the students to the target language is limited in Japan. So how can teachers give students an effective class in which listening is taught?

Problems which students at the beginning level might have They only think of translation of single words. They rely too much on information at one level. They come to the listening experience with fixed idea of what they will hear, and be unwilling to change their idea as the text comes in. They are less able to revise their schemata when faced with contradictory information and wither ignore the contradiction or shift their conceptual frameworks too frequently.

Phonological problems which students have. Students often meet difficulties when they are in listening activity. One of the difficulties is the phonological problems because English has sounds which Japanese don’t have. For example almost all students can’t distinguish [r] from [l]. Besides, they need to know about the assimilation(同化), the contraction(短縮) and so on.

Listening Comprehension in the classroom When teachers organize the lesson, they should include these principles. ・ Increase the amount of listening time in the second language class. ・ Use listening before other activities. ・ Include both global and selective listening. ・ Activate top-level skills. ・ Work towards automaticity in processing. ・ Develop conscious listening strategies.

Processing of listening Top-down processes which are driven by learner’s expectations and understandings of the context, the topic.

Bottom-up processes which are triggered by the sounds, words, and phrases which the listener hears as he or she attempts to decode speech and assign meaning. Goals of each process at the beginning level Top-down processes ・Discriminate between emotional reactions ・Get the gist or main idea of a passage ・Recognize the topic

Bottom-up processes ・Discriminate between intonation contours in sentences. ・Discriminate between phonemes. ・Listen for morphological endings. ・ Recognize syllable patterns, number of syllables, and word stress. ・Be aware of sentence fillers in informal speech. ・Select details from the text.

Good ways to teach listening ・teach English at the same time ・give students some information/activities before listening ・ make students to get gist at the first time (not to make students translate word by word) ・give students some speaking activities after they did listening activity. ・do reading activity at the same time

When should students listen intensively, and when extensively? I think that when the students arrive at time to go to the next level, they should try to listen intensively and when they need to comprehend, or to be able to understand most of the listening at the level, they should do it extensively.

Where can students find more listening activities out of class? ・Radio program ・TV program such as Sesame Street, some TV dramas and news program. ・DVD When students watch movies, they can listen daily conversation and they can make sure what was said if they chose English subtitles. ・ CD Students can choose any kind of music CD and they can get a rhythm and pronunciation of English. ・Read something in English by themselves at loud.