3 chapter I difficulties and strategies in listening comprehension

2.2 Strategies in English listening teaching
So often we are thinking about our response to a student rather than listening to them. Use the counselling skill of rephrasing or restating what pupils say to enhance your listening. Request pupils to repeat your or others’ points of view. No matter how insists on one individual speaking at a time either in whole class discussions, paired or group work. It is said that you should demonstrate the skill to the class by drawing their attention to your listening with younger grades, and having older grades explain what effective listening looks like, sounds like, and feels like. Take a short time to find out about their interests, hobbies, music and sport, families etc. It will help you to understand that children will take heed to listen more to instructors they feel are interested in them and know them. In high school, where you may teach up to 150 students use memory tricks, think of school photos or take notes so you can use the knowledge in your speech with students.
As a general rule, kids can in effect hear for about half their age in minutes, so for a child of 10 that’s about 5 minutes, for a 15 yr old, that’s about 7.5 minutes! You need to mix up the activities in the class so that they are talking, writing, moving and listening in a variety of ways. What is their behavior trying to communicate? You may find it unusual that listening to what students think and feel about the work they are asked to complete and the way they are being taught can give you clues as to your effectiveness as a teacher and how you could change things to more effectively assist student learning. [10;126].
Three to Flee Strategy. (Best fit for presentations.) This strategy promotes active listening, engagement, and opportunity for sharing insight.
Whether it be pupils or instructors presenting material, keep the audience on their toes. A powerful way to do this is by stopping every 5 minutes to ask for three takeaways, insights, or pieces of information about the material. I would like to say that if the presenter does not get three responses from the audience, they wait. To flee, or move on, the presenter needs three.
Bundles, Bullets, and Views Strategy. (Best fit for understanding directions.) Are you a paragraph (bundle), orderly (bullets), or visual (views) type of person? Studies have shown that when you write things down, you tend to recollect them better. This thinking is similar to understanding directions. In the schoolroom, you might find that pupils try to struggle with following directions on assignments, projects, and activities. By providing students with three options—bundles, bullets, and views—you offer choice in how they best to process directions, although it doesn’t hurt to use all three.
This strategy is quite simple. When giving directions to a room full of listeners, allow them to engage in this strategy. They can write out the directions in paragraph form (bundle), list the directions in order (bullets), or draw a picture (view).
What is it that you do not understand? (Best fit for general understanding.) It’s all about the way you phrase it. If you ask students, “Do you understand?” most of the time you get nodding heads or crickets. Phrasing the question this way, “What is it that you do not understand?” encourages students to think and respond.
With the class, another way you can phrase this question is by asking, “What about this idea does not make sense?” The point is that the more students engage in clarifying questions, the more inclined they are to acquire the habit of metacognition. A sure-fire method of getting your students to deliberately think about their thoughts, knowledge, and feelings about a subject offers much more certainty for teachers than just receiving a nod.[7;129].
The Interval Clock Strategy. (Best fit for group work.) Allow the clock to manage time for listening to one another. Be enthusiastic by beginning to set a timer for a particular amount of time you think your students should talk and listen to one another’s ideas about a particular assignment or topic.
So first in a history class, getting the pupil to engage in this strategy might sound like this: “In your groups, you will have 5 minutes to discuss a historical figure that all of you believe would be worth researching. Listen intently to one another’s ideas, thoughts, and suggestions. Be ready after 5 minutes of discussion to share your group’s ideas with the class.”
Here are some great questions you could ask to show that your students were listening:
What were some ideas that your group came up with?
What is a suggestion that a group member made?
Can anyone summarize your group’s conversation?
If listening can improve productivity, avoid misunderstanding, and improve accuracy, why wouldn’t we teach this skill? It would be rewarding to hear less of What do we need to do again? And more of I understand!
It Is enormously important that before listening students are motivated to listen, so teacher should try to select a text that they will find interesting and then design tasks that will arouse students’ interest and curiosity.ContextualisationWhen we listen in our everyday lives we hear language within its natural environment, and that environment gives us a huge amount of information about the linguistic content we are likely to hear. Listening to a tape recording in a classroom is a very unnatural process. So, the text must be taken from its original environment and teachers need to design tasks that will help students to contextualize the listening, predict before listening and access their existing knowledge and expectations to help them understand the text.
To do the listening task there could be specific vocabulary or expressions that students will need. It’s vital that teachers prepare the students by providing them necessary vocabulary and atmosphere.