Teaching listening skills for academic lecture comprehension

¶ … Teaching of Listening for Academic Purposes

This report focuses on ways to explore the teaching of listening for the purposes of academics. The most commonly used mode of teaching or educational method used almost everywhere in the world is speaking. This is because a lot of knowledge and information passed on to pupils and students besides use of textbooks is through verbal communications which in educational communities are known as lectures.

This paper is divided into 3 parts. Section 1 covers different aspects and cultures of lectures and how this challenges students. Section 2 discusses methods of teaching students to learn listening and lastly, section 3 discusses activities that will assist students in listening to lectures

An important aspect of teaching and education is listening because in the absence of aural or verbal contact ways of transmitting ideas and thoughts in order to convey education may not be possible.

Aspects of Lecture and how this challenge students

Lectures as a mode of knowledge transmission to students are multimodal communicative processes that combine various aspects like voice quality, tone, visual resources and body language.

Methods of teaching students to learn listening

In this section, I would like to consider various programs supporting the training and teaching of skills necessary for academic listening. There are many training programs that are available for people who are interested in learning listening skills online. For this discussion, let us use the journal of James Richards on teaching listening and speaking. Richard (2008) pays attention to many forms of teaching methods of learning to listen. The listening process is here divided into two primary approaches known as bottom-up approach and top-down approach

In the bottom-up listening approach a listener takes note of several low level clues. This begins by identifying individual sounds which are then linked to form distinct syllables and words. It is these words that are joined together to form phrases, clauses and sentences which finally form the text of a conversation. In the top-down listening approach the listener employs a lot of helps from the prevailing situation and his/her personal knowledge in order to arrive at a correct interpretation of phrases, context, texts and sentences that form a conversation. In the actual world both the bottom-up and bottom-down elements appear in conversations (UEFAP, 2014). Keen listeners should employ both of the approaches while following a discussion.

All sequences of listening that link the bottom-up and top-down approaches are found in a three part sequence of pre-listening, while-listening and post-listening contained in the teaching materials of a typical modern lesson (Richard, 2008). Through such activities as activation of prior knowledge, revision of key vocabulary and predicting things the student gets prepared for all the phases by the pre-listening stage. Then by employing exercises that need selective listening and sequencing the student is prepared for comprehension through the while-listening stage; and lastly, the post-listening stage require the students to discuss what they think by sharing opinion as a means of responding to comprehension.

Richards (2008) also mentions a list of listening strategies in his journal in which he explains two primary listening strategies, and notes that the strategies employed by a listener in an audio situation can be used to measure successful listening.

Two primary strategies of listening identified by Buck (2001) are 1) Cognitive Strategy; and 2) Metacognitive Strategy. The cognitive strategies are linked to mental activities responsible for keeping/storage of long-term memory to be retrieved later by the working memory. This strategy is broken into several other steps to include the storing and memory process, the comprehension process and the process of retrieving from memory. The second process, the metacognitive strategy, is associated with both conscious and unconscious activities of the mind responsible for important functions in managing cognitive strategies. It is also broken into various stages like assessment of a situation by considering conditions prevailing around a language task, monitoring performance while a task is on through evaluation, and determining the effectiveness of the performance by self-evaluation, and lastly conducting a self-test.

Goh and Yusnita (2006) identifies many stages in guided metacognitive sequence in a listening lesson which include 1)Pre-listening activities through which students predict words while listening and writing them down. They can do this using their first language. 2) After listening, and while listening the students need to circle or underline the words and phrases they have correctly predicted and write any new information that comes up. 3) In a discussion based on pairs, the students should determine what they have learned through comparison and justify how they come to their conclusion or understanding. They should identify the stages they disagree on or find confusing, and specially identify parts of the text that might require special attention during the second listening. 4) During the second listening, the students should pay attention to areas on which they do not agree or which confuse them and jot down any new words of information they manage to capture during the second listening.5) In a discussion involving the entire class, or a class-based process, the teacher or professor takes the lead to confirm what the students have comprehended about the strategies they reportedly used.

Students who are not native speakers can use the strategies and methods mentioned above to help the overcome the challenges they might meet while trying to follow lectures. In this case listening is used as a way of comprehending to gain knowledge effectively by the students. Student still face several other problems like catching the word flow or speed of speech by the lecturer and use of shortened forms during a conversation. Using unusual forms of speech such as slanging and colloquialism by the lecturers is also a matter of grave concern to non-native speakers who find it hard to follow a lecture because they cannot understand the unusual words or language used. While listening to lectures, note taking forms a vital aspect of the listening process (Ferris, 1996). Notes are useful because they allow the students to get a second perspective of the lecture they have previously listened to. In all the above mentioned listening strategies, they are quite important and therefore they should be efficiently made using abbreviations in order to write fast without losing track of the lecture.

Activities that will assist students in listening to lectures

By choosing a relevant subject or topic to their school/university, I will ask the students to use this to assist them on how to listen to a lecture. There are quite a number of listening methods that have been devised presently, and since this is a process and not an event or a step, several listening strategies have been formulated to help students acquire listening skills. It is true that to be a knowledgeable scholar one has to be a good listener. One must therefore cultivate the habit of note taking while listening to a lecture as this has been proved to be the oldest but simplest and easiest means of effectively listening and following a lecture. The best way that a student can employ to revise and review what has been learned in a lecture is by taking down notes for later reference. It also provides the learner with the opportunity to re-examine words or phrases that he/she might have misunderstood during the lecture. Through discussions with other students, such words or phrases can be explained better. Active participation in interpersonal activities like mock interviews and storytelling sessions can also be used to develop better listening skills. During such activities, I'll ask the students to form groupings in which they chose to take part in a given listening activity. Other ways of improving listening skills include instructional lectures, audio messages and listening to audio segments from online podcasts. Listening skills can also be taught through bigger listening group activities. By dividing the students into many groups, I'll ask them to determine the interests and hobbies of two other group members. Apart from taking notes, they should be challenged and encourage to probe and ask questions. After practicing for sometimes, they should be asked to make notes after the activity is over which they can later refer to when discussing the hobbies and interests of other group members they encountered. I hope that these activities will encourage the students to develop better listening skills. Questionnaires containing questions from the activities can also be distributed later for determining the listening ability of the students and the progress they have made, if any (Classroom.synonym, 2014).

Use of video segments is also of great importance when teaching listening skills. The segments should include news programs, comic or dramatic materials, documentaries and interview segments (Classroom.Synonym, 2014). I will choose a video segment from which the students can identify specific theme and content as they watch depending on the listening skill level of the student. I will watch the video with the students more than one time, first with the sound turned off and then with the sound turned on. After this I will instruct them to briefly summarize the video segment they have watched and based on this, they can initiate a discussion. The main purpose of conducting this exercise is to provide me with data relevant to particular listening skills and to enable me to determine general aspects that the students need to review in order to improve.

With regard to this specific example, students who meet difficulties in following lectures due to language barriers can adopt various listening methods so as to improve their listening skills, for instance, they can choose to request to ask their lecturer to speak slowly and simply when presenting a lecture as a major first step (Huang,2004). And instead of slangs and colloquial use of language, the students can ask the lecturer to speak formally. I should encourage them to participate more in class discussions so that the class environment can make them get clear notions about the language being used. I also should encourage them to take notes more often which they can later review and discuss the difficulties they encountered while the lecture was in progress. I will also encourage students who are not native to read newspapers often, watch news on TV and listen to radios that broadcast in English language so that they can easily follow the lectures delivered in this language. This is because it is an interactive two way process and by practicing the above always, they will get accustomed to unfamiliar use of the language which will enable them to understand various usages of idioms and out of context expressions I use while lecturing. Listeners should be made aware that they are active and not passive participants in any conversation, and so they ought to know how to decipher meaning from the sounds they capture with their ears (UEFAP, 2014).

They should construct meaning by applying their knowledge of the language, the world around them and the subject. They need to know that while listening they should remain active all the times. So it is instructive that they should reflect on what they know or don't know, formulate questions on the subject based on the information they have before they begin listening. Titles and subtitles and section headings should guide them in formulating questions so that they keep on interacting as stated by UEFAP (2014) in note taking and listening comprehension activities. Many studies demonstrate that definite signals of the text structure should considered while listening to lectures in order for them to gain an idea of what the lecturer is saying. The listening strategies mentioned above will greatly aid the students learn listening for academic purposes as a way of familiarizing themselves with key elements of a subject or topic.