Listening Activities in the Elt

¶ … listening activities in the ELT classroom, and how these tend to be somewhat removed from authentic texts not specifically created for ELT listening. The chapter makes the point that, because of the basic lack of authenticity in listening texts, students in such a classroom are generally unable to enter a normal conversation in an everyday social scene. Because they have never been exposed to authentic listening and speaking, these students tend to speak in a very formal way.

The chapter distinguishes between authentic listening texts and those created specifically for the classroom by means of various elements. In ELT listening texts, intonation is for example much more varied and pitched than in normal conversation; which is reminiscent of a mother's talk to her baby. Words are pronounced very clearly in a way that is not used in everyday conversation. There also tends to be a repetition of structural forms as learned in the classroom.

The pace is uniform and slow, and the quantity of speech for all participants in the conversation tends to be equal. In ELT conversational materials, attention signals such as "mmm" and "uhu" tend to be missing. The speech is also very formal and precise. According to the chapter, these elements create a rather large mismatch between normal discourse and that used in the ELT classroom. It is therefore little wonder that students in such classroom struggle to assimilate with local society.

They simply cannot help themselves in the authentic conversational setup, because they have never been exposed to it. For this reason, the chapter emphasizes the importance of at least some exposure to authentic conversation in the classroom. The unrealistic match between listening and spoken language leads to the inability of a student to transfer his or her skills to the social situation. Upon the question of why this situation exists in the ELT classroom, the chapter blames the lack of focus upon listening skills.

A trend started by the audio-lingual method is that listening was used as part of the production exercise. In other words, exercises that involved listening normally used the skill only as a vehicle to produce accurate linguistic forms in writing or speaking. Listening was seldom, if ever, used for receiving new or unpredictable information. The type of listening taught in the classroom is therefore as non-authentic as the texts used to teach the skill.

The chapter illustrates the multi-faceted nature of listening by a list of authentic listening activities in everyday situations. For the classroom, the second part of the chapter offers several suggestions for authentic classroom listening activities. In active guessing, for example, students use linguistic clues to decipher what they do not know in a listening text. The chapter also suggests that classroom participants should replicate the roles of native speakers.

The chapter concludes that authentic listening is an essential part of providing and adequate ELT environment that students can apply to the social context. In conclusion, the article taught me the importance of teaching authentic listening skills in the classroom. I was not fully aware of.