The Strategies of English Listening Skills1.doc

The Strategies of English Listening SkillsContentsAbstract.1Key words.1I. Introduction1II. Literature Review2. Listening Comprehension Problems4.Principles and Goals for Teaching Listening54.1 Principles for Teaching Listening54.2 Goals for Teaching Listening64.2.1 Focus: The Listening Process.64.2.2 Integrating Met cognitive Strategies74.2.3 Using Authentic Materials and Situations.7.The Strategies of Listening Skills 85.1 Listening for Meaning95.2 Listening Strategies95.2.1 Categories of Strategies95.2.2 Important Strategies for Listening.105.2.3 Other Strategies for English Listening.11.Teaching and Learning Listening 126.1 Pre-listening Activities136.1.1 Predicting.136.1.2 Setting the Scene.136.1.3 Listening for the Gist.136.1.4 Listening for Specific Information.136.2 While-listening Activities146.3 Post-listening Activities 146.4 The Solutions of the Listening Problems14VII.Conclusion15References16摘要：听在语言学习中确实担任一个主角, 但这仍然是学生感到的有最多挫折和无助的区域。听力策略对听力理解起积极的作用，这就意味着正式的听力策略的训练应该在外语听力教学中占有一席之地。本文讨论了听力过程中存在的普遍问题，根据对听力本质理解的新发现和优势，我试图阐述了当前的完善的英语教学练习以及听力教学的策略和技巧。他们能帮助学生发展一些听力的策略和适合各种听力场合的听力技巧。关键词： 听力理解；学习策略；听力教学Abstract: Listening has rightly assumed a central role in language learning, but it is still an area where students feel most frustrated and helpless. It was found that the listening strategies contributed positively to listening comprehension, which led to the implication that formal strategy training should have a role in the foreign language listening classroom. This paper addresses problems common in the listening. In light of many new discoveries and advances in understanding the nature of listening, I also try to address current inadequate practices of teaching listening and the strategies and skills for teaching and learning listening. They help students develop a set of listening strategies and match appropriate strategies to each listening situation.Key words: listening comprehension; learning strategies; teaching listening I.IntroductionListening, quite possibly, is the most important of the language skills, since people spend approximately 60% of their time to listen. The most important first step in learning a foreign language is to make an effort to listen. If you dont learn to listen effectively, you will not be able to participate in conversations in the foreign language. (Thompson & Rubin, 2004: 85). Anderson and Lynch (1988:60) point out “listening is an essential skill for communication.” Listening is the most common communicative activity in daily life: "we can expect to listen twice as much as we speak, four times more than we read, and five times more than we write." (Morley, 1991:85).Listening is the central role in language learning and greatly affects the communication with others, and it has been emphasized in Chinas College English curriculum and examinations since the mid-1980s, but this skill remains poor and difficult for many learners even after they have had six to ten years of experience in learning English and it is still let the students feel most frustrated and helpless. so it is important to improve the listening strategies for teachers and learners. In this paper, I will analyze the problems of listening and point out different views about teaching English listening, at the mean time, I will say the strategies of English listening skills.II .Literature reviewThe listening process is often described from an information processing perspective as "an active process in which listeners select and interpret information that comes from auditory and visual clues in order to define what is going on and what the speakers are trying to express" (Thompson & Rubin, 1996: 331). Anderson and Lynch (1988) distinguish between reciprocal listening and non-reciprocal listening. Reciprocal refers to those listening tasks where there is the opportunity for the listener to interact with the speaker, and to negotiate the content of the interaction. Thompson & Rubin (2004: 85) points out in interactive listening, one can intervene by asking additional questions and seeking clarification, repetition, or rephrasing. Non-reciprocal listening refers to tasks where the transfer information is in one direction only from the speaker to the listener, such as listening to the radio or listening to a formal lecture. ( Anderson & Lynch, 1988). Richards (1987a) divided listening comprehension into conversational listening (listening to casual speech) and academic listening (listening to lectures and other academic presentations). Rost (2002) defines listening as having a receptive, constructive, collaborative and Tran formative orientation. The listener, in this view, not only receives what the speaker say, but goes through a process of constructing a meaning, negotiates this with the speaker and through personal involvement transforms what is heard. Hegelsen (2003) describes listening as “very active. As people listen, they process not only what they hear but also connect it to other information they already know. Since listeners combine what they hear with their own ideas and experiences, in a very real sense they are creating the meaning-in their own minds.”Generally speaking, listening in real life has the following characteristics(Ur, 1996:106).Spontaneity. While some of the things that we listen to are rehearsed.Context. The context of listening is usually known in real life. In other words, we know the relationship between the listener and the speaker.Visual clues. Most of the time we can see the person we are listening to. This means we can see their facial expressions, gestures and other body language as well as the surrounding environment, which is relevant when, for example, people point at objects or in certain directions.Listeners response. Most of the listening in daily life allows the listener to respond to the speaker, such as in a conversation.Speakers adjustment. In most cases, the speaker is talking directly to the listener, so he or she can adjust the way of speaking according to the listeners reactions.In Methodology in Language Teaching (Jack & Willy, 2002:235) the two major methods of listening are identified as: the “bottom-up” processing view and “top-down” processing interpretation view. The bottom-up processing holds that listening is a liner, data-driven process. Comprehension occurs to the extent that the listener is successful in decoding the spoken text. The top-down model of listening, by contrast, involves the listener in actively constructing meaning based on expectation, inferences, intentions, and other relevant prior knowledge. Richards (1990:51) Top-down strategies are listener based; the listener taps into background knowledge of the topic, the situation or context, the type of text, and the language. This background knowledge activates a set of expectations that help the listener to interpret what is heard and anticipate what will come next. Bottom-up strategies are text based; the listener relies on the language in the message, that is, the combination of sounds, words, and grammar that creates meaning. Since the beginning of reform and opening up, China's international exchanges become more frequent, economic and social development requires four skills higher and more comprehensive. Currently, in many schools, listening has been separated into a separate course, but it does not solve the disadvantage status of listening fundamentally. Successful listening involves an integration of these component skills. In this sense, listening is a coordination of the component skills, not the individual skills themselves. As theorized in Anderson's (1983, 1995) associative stage of skill acquisition, errors or obstacles become an important index of the learning process. However, learning obstacles have not been widely researched in the field of language learning strategies .This integration of these perception skills, analysis skills, and synthesis skills is what we will call a person's listening ability. Even though a person may have good listening ability, he or she may not always be able to understand what is said in every situation. In order to understand messages, some conscious action is necessary to use this ability effectively in each listening situation. This action that a listener must perform is "cognitive" or mental, so it is not possible to view it directly, but we can see the effects of this action. The underlying action for successful listening is decision-making.Benson and Hjelt (1978) suggest three main historical views of the role of listening in the whole L2 learning process:Firstly, there is the view that language learning is a linear process. The second view is of language learning as an integrative process. The third view is that language learning is best thought of as comprehension-focused process.III. Listening Comprehension ProblemsConsidering various aspects of listening comprehension, Underwood (1989) organizes the major listening problems as follows: Lack of control over the speed at which speakers speed. People cant control the speakers speed when he feel the speed is too fast.Not being able to get things repeated. Often the speakers only say something one time and the listener cant get things repeated.The listener's limited vocabulary. If the listener has small vocabulary, he will feel very difficult to understand the speakers meaning.Problems of interpretation, Inability to concentrate, and established learning habits. Underwood (1989) sees these problems as being related to learners' different backgrounds, such as their culture and education. She points out that students whose culture and education includes a strong storytelling and oral communication tradition are generally "better" at listening comprehension than those from a reading and book-based cultural and educational background.Goh (2000) found that listeners complained of problems such as "quickly forget what is heard," "unable to form a mental representation from words heard," and "do not understand subsequent parts of input because of earlier problems." Third, in the utilization stage, "understand the words but not the intended message" and "confused about the key ideas in the message" were often mentioned. These reported difficulties partially reflect Underwood's (1989) views on L2/FL listening problems. However, as learners attempt to incorporate certain strategies into the listening process, they are likely to face different challenges or problems. Besides these factors, there are some other factors, which influence successful listening comprehension (Mawenli, 2004:208)Listener may not hear adequately what has been said.Speech may contain words or phrases that the listener can not understand because of serious problems with the syntax or semantics of the foreign language.Sometimes the listener may understand what he hears but interpret as other meanings.Information organization and familiarity of topic.IV .Principles and Goals for Teaching Listening4.1 Principles for Teaching ListeningThere are two major purposes in listening. The first is for social reasons, like when we have a casual conversation with friends or acquaintances to maintain or build social relationships. The second is to exchange information and the second kind is more difficult. (Anderson and Lynch, 1988).There are some principles for teaching listening ( Wangqiang, 2000:84):Firstly, focus on process. Listening is an active skill. People must do many things to process information that they are receiving. First they have to hear what is being said, then they have to pay attention, and construct a meaningful message in their mind by relating what they hear to what they already know. It is simply more difficult for teachers to judge how well the students comprehend the message. So it is very important to design tasks the performance of which show how well the students have comprehended the listening material. Secondly, combine listening and speaking. It is also important to develop speaking and listening skills together, because most of the time in real life these two skills are needed at the same time. In the traditional listening classroom, students listen to tapes with headphones and then answer listening comprehension questions. There are two problems with this approach. One is that it does not give students chance to practice listening and speaking skills together. The second problem is that the listening comprehension questions only test the students, but do not train the students how to listen or how to develop effective listening strategies. So in the future, when we teaching students listening we should practice both the students listening and speaking.Thirdly, focus on comprehending meaning. Another problem with many listening exercises in traditional textbooks is that they test students memory, not their listening comprehension. It is important to design tasks that do not ask learners to remember details that wouldnt even remember in their native language.Fourthly, grade difficulty level appropriately. When designing listening tasks, it is very important to grade the difficulty level of the tasks. The factors listed below can help you judge the relative ease or difficulty of a listening text for a particular purpose and a particular group of students. 4.2 Goals for Teaching ListeningInstructors want to produce students who, even if they do not have complete control of the grammar or an extensive lexicon, can fend for themselves in communication situations. In the case of listening, this means producing students who can use listening strategies to maximize their comprehension of aural input, identify relevant and non-relevan