OBJECTIVES:
At the end of the lesson, the student(s) should be able to:
a. understand what Listening Comprehension is;
b. explain its ideals and content; and
c. realize its importance in a daily utterance of discourse.
Listening
Nik Peachey, a teacher, trainer and materials writer claims that
“by developing the students’ ability as they try to listen well to
become more independent learners, as by hearing accurately they are
much more likely to be able to reproduce accurately, refine their
understanding of grammar a n d develop their own
vocabulary” (Peachey, 2010).
Rost (2002) defines listening as a complex process of
interpretation in which listeners match what they hear with
what they already know.
In addition, listening is a receptive
People receive language rather than produce it.
Mukminatun (2009) states that
skill .
listening is an
invisible mental process, making it difficult to describe
and defines listening, in its broadest sense, as a
>process of receiving what the speaker actually says
(receptive orientation);
>constructing and representing meaning (constructive
orientation);
>negotiating meaning with the speaker and responding
(collaborative orientation); and,
>creating meaning through involvement, imagination and
empathy (transformative orientation).
Harmer (2007) enumerates five principles
Here are the principles:
in listening.
Encourage students to listen as often and as
much as possible. The more students listen, the better they
get at listening – and the better they get at understanding
pronunciation and at using it appropriately themselves.
Once may not be enough. There are almost no
occasions when the teacher will play an audio track only once.
Students will want to hear it again to pick up the things they
missed the first time – and they may well want them to have a
chance to study some of the language features on the tape.
In the case of live listening, students should be encouraged to
ask for repetition and clarification when they need it.
Help students prepare to listen. Students need to be
made ready to listen. This is not just so that they are in the right
frame of mind (and are thinking about the topic), but also so
that they are engaged with the topic and task and really want to
listen.
Encourage students to respond to the content of
a listening, not just to the language. An important part
of a listening sequence is for teachers to draw out the
meaning of what is being said, discern what is intended and
find out what impression it makes on the students.
Different listening stages demand different
listening tasks. Because there are different things that the
listeners want to do with a listening text, they need to set
different task for different listening stages. This means that, for
a first listening, the task may need to be fairly straightforward
and general. That way, the students’ general understanding and
response can be successful – and the stress associated with
listening can be reduced.
Critical Listening
Critical thinking expert Paul (2006) defines critical
listening as “a mode of monitoring how they are
listening so as to maximize their accu r at e
understanding of what another person is saying”
(Glossary of Critical Thinking Terms).
Listening critically to others involve
1) analyzing and assessing assumptions, claims, and
information, and
2) sympathetically entering into the perspectives of others.
Many people, including students, find this type of
listening to be challenging. Despite the fact that listening critically can
seem difficult at first, students must learn, practice, and master this skill in
order to achieve success in school and in the workplace and to engage in
empathic communication and effective collaboration with others.
In addition, Tavris and Aronson, (2007) hypothetically
claim that critical thinkers and critical listeners are truthseekers. They want to uncover and learn the truth more than
they want to be “right” and part of being a good listener is to
learn when to use caution in evaluating the
messages we hear (Stand up, Speak out: The Practice and Ethics of Public
Speaking, 2016).
Listening Comprehension
Listening comprehension is the basis for one’s
speaking, writing and reading skills . To train one’s
listening skills, it is important to listen actively, which means to
actively pay attention to what he/she listens to. One should
make it a habit to listen to audio books, podcasts,
news, songs, etc. and to watch videos and films in
the foreign language (Learning English Online, 2015).
Listening comprehension refers to the
understanding of the implications and explicit
meanings of words and sentences of spoken
language. It is more than just hearing what was being said, it
is a child’s ability to understand the meaning of the words they
hear and to relate to them in some way.
When children hear a story, for instance, good
listening comprehension enables them to understand it,
remember it, discuss it, and even retell it in their own words.
This is an important skill to learn even at an early age, because
good listeners grow up to become good
communicators (Nasrudin, 2013).
Bloomfield et al. (2010) expresses that one of the
serious problems of listening comprehension is related to
the pronunciation of words that is different from the way
they appear in print. Because the spoken language varies to
the form of the written language, the recognition of words that
make the oral speech can create some difficulties for students.
In order to understand how listeners understand spoken
language, it is essential to understand the listening
comprehension process. There are three distinct stages in
the aural reception of the utterance (Underwood, 1989).
At the first stage , the sounds go into a
sensory store to be organized into meaningful units
based on the listener’s existing knowledge of the
language. While the sounds remain in this stage, for a
limited period, the listener has trouble understanding
what is heard leading to the listener’s missing the
incoming new information while he/she is busy with a
previous chunk of data.
A f t e r t h a t , i n t h e second stage , t h e
information processed in the short-term memory. At this
point, words are checked and compared with the
information already held in the long-term memory from
which the meaning was extracted. However, if the
speed of processing is too fast, the actual words might
be forgotten, especially when the second chunk of
information arrives in the short term memory before the
previous chunk has already been processed.
At the third stage, after the listener constructs
meaning from the utterance, he/she might transfer the
information to the long-term memory for later use.
REFERENCE
Gamba, S. and Lasaca, G. (2018). Let's Learn to Listen Listen to Learn: A Listening Comprehension Workbook for
Grade 9 students. Unpublished Thesis. Mindanao State
University