By: Santillan, Esther Ruth A.
Of four language skills, listening has been sadly neglected. Language is basically oral, thus students should develop their listening and speaking skills side by side with their reading and writing skills. Listening is a complex skill that requires attention and energy. It involves recognition, selection, short-term memory, and inference. The listener recognizes the sounds and the words as well. Listening is also a creative skill. We hear sounds, words, the rise and fall of the voice, from all of which we create significance. We listen not for words alone but for meanings. For meaning we listen for cues like, inflection, pitch and volume.
Sixty to seventy percent of the time, students will be listening to their teachers and classmates in the classroom, to their parents and other members of the family at home, to announcers on radio and television programs. But how much of what they hear do they understand? If you give a listening comprehension test to your students now, you may be shocked at the state of neglect of their listening skill. Louis J. Spaventa, in a monograph on Listening: Listening Comprehension suggests the following activities inorder to develop the listening skills of the students:
Picture communication, this is for lower intermediate and above level. In this activity students are paired up. One student has a simple line drawing which he then describes to his partner. His partner must duplicate the drawing without looking at it. The pair may look at each other’s drawings. Both may ask for and give information.
Listening for Word Order, this is for elementary to advanced level. The teacher will present to the students a list of words in alphabetical order and instructs them to number them in the order they hear them in the passage. Then the passage is read at normal speed, varying pause length according to student level. The teacher may read the passage as many times as the students request. The exercise ends when students agree on the order of the words.
Reflecting Language, this is for upper intermediate to advanced level. Students are grouped in five’s or six’s and a discussion topic is given or students start a discussion themselves. Before a person can take the floor in the group discussion, that person must summarize the basic ideas of the person who has spoken, to the satisfaction of that individual. Other group members act as judges. The discussion continues with each student summarizing the previous one.
In the exercise that you prepare for listening comprehension, it is recommended that you follow this format by Rebecca Alcantara (1996): Identify the skills you want to develop through the exercise. Is it selection? Is it improving or developing the memory? Is it inference? Possibly, the exercise could develop two or more of these skills. The situation should be clearly described or stated. Before listening to the taped conversation or other taped material, prepare the students. Explain the situation clearly. Tell them what they have to listen for. Extension activities should be provided. These are variations of the activity you introduced. They could serve as follow-up activities to ensure automatic use of the structure.
It should be remembered that the four skills; listening, speaking, reading, and writing are interwoven in every listening activity. They are not taught in isolation depending on the objective of the teachers.
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