By Erika Narez
In this report I examine what is the importance of listening comprehension in language learning and how can we foster such comprehension in order to reach a higher competence in the target language, as well as how can we as teachers offer learners the opportunity to develop this ability and to facilitate them with strategies and techniques. The following questions are addressed: 1) What is the role of listening in language learning? 2) How much oral input do we need in order to perform orally? 3) What are the elements of listening processes? 4) How comprehension takes place in the listener’s brain? 5) What are the characteristics of listening that makes it difficult? 6) How can we overcome such difficulties?
In order to produce language we need first to receive linguistic information and process it adequately. A clear example is a deaf and dumb person, someone who cannot hear cannot speak either; even though his vocal cords might be healthy. That is why recently there has been a major concern in teaching a second language with the listening skills. In the decades of the 1950’s and 60’s, language teaching methodology was concerned with the speaking ability, as a result learners normally made meaningfulness drills of language they did not understand. It was with the Total Physical Response developed by James Asher’s (1977) that listening took place as a more important component in language learning and teaching to later continue this belief with the Natural Approach.
The importance of input was the outcome of research studies, Stephen Krashen (1985) manifested such importance making a comparison with the first language acquisition, stating that the input must be comprehensible and should be a little beyond of the listener competence. It is important to emphasize that what counts is what the listeners store in their minds out of what they hear, that is called ‘’intake’’. We can expose our students to a great quantity of language, but the importance is in how much did they comprehend and processed using cognitive strategies of retention and also through interaction. As a matter of fact, the focus for teachers must be in how to convert the input into intake.
There have been discovered some characteristics that affect the speed and efficiency of processing aural language, these are: text, interlocutor, task, listener and process characteristics, Rubin (1994).
According to Brown H.D. (2001), listening is interactive in which the brain do affective and cognitive mechanisms of what it hears. I will describe how comprehension takes place in the listeners’ minds; first, the listener create an image of what he heard in short-term memory, then a determination of what type of speech it is takes place and the objective of the speaker is inferred, next the listener remember background information related to the topic (schemata), the listener gives a literal and intended meaning to it, then the listener decides if it should be stored in short or long-term memory, finally the listener transform the message form into a conceptual information, the reason for this transformation is because this way it is easier to recall it if it is necessary.
As we can see, listening is not a passive skill; it is very interactive since it has many processes in order to assimilate it. Another issue is that it is necessary not only comprehend what we listen, but to respond appropriately and opportunely to it, the interaction that takes place in a conversation. Then, it is a must to teach not only listening skills but conversational skills as well. Our students will be engaged in real situations where these skills will be needed, so it is important to consider strategies and techniques to foster such skills.
First, let’s focus on the nature of listening. Listening has been regarded as one of the most difficult competence to develop. It has some characteristics that make it unique, it is important to know these features in order to know how to face them. In spoken language we divide speech into smaller units; it has more redundancy and reduced forms. Another characteristic is that is presents hesitations, false starts, pauses and corrections and more important it contains ungrammatical forms; we normally expose our students to a grammatical language because it is correct, but when it comes to speaking people do many slips and speak with more colloquialisms or slang. In a listening situation, it is difficult to stop it to have time to think and process that information, so one of the major difficulties is that speech just flow and we need to be adapted to it ant to process faster the information received. The intonation is very important to comprehend not only the literal meaning but the implied one.
The interaction plays an important role in listening comprehension, as I mentioned above, we need to be able to respond to what we listen, to give feedback to it and to keep the conversation going.
Taking into account the analysis of listening comprehension, I conclude that we need to expose our students to comprehensible input so that they can easier convert it into intake and have the reference to produce language. It is important to be aware of the factors of a good listening comprehension; we as teacher should foster it by providing a wide variety of examples of listening situations and more than that to create techniques in which the learner can respond to the listening input, interacting. Maybe not everything is known yet about listening comprehension, the research continues trying to clear more how this happen, meanwhile our responsibility is to work with the information we have and why not, to discover something else through experience and observation.
BIBLIOGRAPHY:
• Brown H.D. 2001.Teaching by Principles. An Interactive approach to Language Pedagogy. 2nd Edition. N.Y. Longman. pgs. 247-254
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