Andijan state institute of foreign languages

Presentation:

Listening as a skill may be extremely similar to reading, but the text the listener has to deal with is considerably different from the written one. Most obviously, the listener cannot look at what he is trying to hear. Whereas the written word stays on the page and can be looked at more than once, the spoken word, unless recorded on tape or record cannot be repeated. Of course in a conversation it is possible to ask someone to say something again, but the fact remains that while a reader can look back at something as many times as he wants, the listener cannot.
Let’s have a look at the following example to understand the concept:
I wonder…I mean I was wondering…if you might possibly…if you would like to come to dinner.
The message is an invitation to dinner, and much of what was said did not help to communicate that message (although it communicated nervousness) and was therefore unnecessary. The listener has to work out what is necessary and what is unnecessary in a case like this. In other words he has to discard the redundant parts of what is said and only listen to the main message. This is a particular listening skill.
One of our tasks when teaching listening will be to train students to understand what is being said in confusing conversations; to get them to discard redundancy, hesitation, ungrammaticality and speakers changing their minds halfway through the sentence. After all, they can do it in their own languages, so it seems reasonable to suppose that we can train them to do it in English although clearly in acceptable stages; we would probably not give the beginner the sort of conversation we have just looked at on his first day of class.
The main purpose of teaching listening is to enable the students to understand spoken English better. The word ‘understand’ can have several meanings. The different activities and material that help students with aspects of understanding can be:

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  Hearing all the words a speaker says.
  
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  Understanding the plain sense of the formation a speaker is giving.
  
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  Deducing the meaning of unknown words and phrases by using the context.
  
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  Understanding what is implied but not stated in so many words.
  
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  Recognizing a speaker’s mood or attitude.
  
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  Recognizing the degree of formality with which the speaker is talking.
  
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  Etc.