Confluence 26 February 2011

Types of Listening

Listening can be categorized variously depending on the purpose of listening, like gist listening, listening for specific details, listening for sound perception and so on. What a keen listener needs to focus on while listening is the individual variation, since speech variation can also depend on context, speaking rate, speaking style, emotional state of speaker, intention or attitude of the speakers. The speaker identities, in turn, depend on gender, age, emotional state, social status and mother tongue.etc. Other aspects of variability include Mother Tongue influence, educational background and learning habits, faulty learning, lack of exposure to target language and relative importance given to pronunciation. The speaker must be aware of using the wrong phoneme, wrong stress on a word or a syllable and non-use of weak forms in English, which can impede communication to a large extent.

To sum up, a good listening comprehension should make a learner:

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  Understand the meaning of new words.
  
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  Respond to simple questions.
  
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  Follow instructions and directions.
  
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  Decode the stylistic variation in spoken language.
  
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  Infer the content from simple conversation.
  
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  Recognize the characters in dialogue forms.
  
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  Repeat the pronunciation clearly and intelligibly.
  

How to develop the language skills

According to Rubin and Thompson (1983) there are four different types of learners:

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  Concrete learners who like to learn from pictures, games, films, videos using cassettes, talking in pairs and practicing English outside class.
  
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  Analytical learners who like studying grammar, English books and reading newspapers, studying alone, finding their own mistakes and working on problems set by the teacher.
  
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  Communicative learners are those who like to learn by watching, listening to native speakers, talking to friends in English and watching television, using English out of class, in stores, trains and so on, learning new words by hearing them and learning by conversations.
  
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  Authority-oriented learners who prefer the teacher to explain everything, like to have their own textbook, to write everything in notebook, to study grammar, learn by reading and learn new words b y seeing them.
  

Our interest for the present study is the third type of learners and who learn better listening more of the spoken language from different sources. These learners learn through association, with mother tongue and drawing analogy with the features of L2 with those of the mother tongue and using the language, in-keeping with the situation appropriately, in terms of vocabulary and syntactic structures. Rost (1994) opines that “…listening is vital in the language classroom because it provides the input for the learner.” He explains the importance of listening in language learning to attain the desired level of proficiency in spoken skills for the following reasons:

1. 
   Spoken language provides a means of interaction for the learner. Because learners must interact to achieve understanding, access to speakers of the language is essential. Moreover, learners’ failure to understand the language they hear is an impetus, not an obstacle, to interaction and learning.
   
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   Authentic spoken language presents a challenge for the learner to attempt to understand language as native speakers actually use it.
   
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   Listening exercises provide teachers with the means for drawing learners’ attention to new forms (vocabulary, grammar, new interaction patterns) in the language.
   

Language is a skill because it is acquired. L1 is acquired unconsciously and L2 is learnt as a social requirement and depends on the motivational level of the learner. However, learning a Foreign Language differs markedly in a formal learning atmosphere. In a formal set up, taught based on the four skills, which are important aspects of language education. Thus language learning is like a process of learning through doing like playing a piano or driving a car, which needs the involvement of auditory and articulatory abilities to learn a language. One of the key elements in language learning is listening to speech, news and music in target language, as much as possible. A perfect interrelation and coordination between the two skills is necessary to be a god communicator.

Researchers on Language teaching believe that “the listener actively construct (or, more accurately, reconstructs) the original meaning of the speaker, using incoming sounds as clues. In this reconstruction process, which the listener uses prior knowledge of the context and situations, within where the listening takes place to make sense of what he or she hears” (Nunan, 1999). Using authentic sample texts for listening comprehension is a very effective way of exposing the learners to different varieties of language currently in use, and it is one way of training the learner in speaker variables and the possible variation in pronunciation. Other materials that can be used in the classroom are dialogues, recorded political speeches, announcements or simple dialogues or other recorded texts. The simplest of listening activity can be the teacher’s voice. Various activities like role play, dictations, telephonic conversations, news voice clippings, recorded radio advertisements for guessing the products being advertised and noting the important details accurately, are very useful and powerful teaching material to be used in language learning, whatever be the level intended.