SEEN 208 Teaching and Assessing Listening Skills PDF

 SEEN 208 TEACHING AND ASSESSMENT OF THE MACRO SKILLS LESSON 4. Teaching and Assessing Listening Skills Overview: This lesson focuses in the following: teaching and assessing listening skills; listening comprehension skil...

 SEEN 208 TEACHING AND ASSESSMENT OF THE MACRO SKILLS LESSON 4. Teaching and Assessing Listening Skills Overview: This lesson focuses in the following: teaching and assessing listening skills; listening comprehension skills; active listening; strategies; principles of teaching listening; purpose of listening comprehension test; types of listening assessment tasks; and problems and challenges in teaching listening comprehension. Learning Objectives: After the successful completion of this lesson, the student should be able to: 1. Know the importance of teaching and assessing listening skill 2. Determine the different strategies 3. Develop deeper understanding on the problems and challenges in teaching listening comprehension. Course Materials Unit 1. Teaching and Assessing Listening Skills Listening is inherently tied to language and is learned differently than skills like writing or reading. Multilingual learners need a specific approach to instruction and assessment in order to be successful at listening for meaning and to ultimately be able to engage in authentic academic conversations. Listening is a communication technique that requires the listener to understand, interpret and evaluate what he or she hears. Listening effectively improves personal relationships through the reduction of conflict and strengthens cooperation through a collective understanding while speaking is vocalization of human communication. Being able to express an idea, concept or opinion through speech is essential in the communicative process and languages are about communication. A good language teacher plan lessons, and sequences of lessons, which include a mixture of all the macro skills, rather than focusing on developing only one macro-skill at a time. Listening is the most important skill in communication. It is a mental operation involving processing sound waves, interpreting their meaning, and storing them in memory. It is a communication technique that requires the listeners to understand, interpret, and evaluate what they hear. It paves the way for other skills to tower over the others because of its significance in terms of speech, discussion and freedom of expression. They serve as an approach to make everybody comprehend which is being said. It is closely related to speaking and it enables the person to soak in any information that is given to them; consequently, the information can be passed on to another party later on after the conversation. On the other hand, learners will develop prediction 1 and anticipation skills in listening. Without listening, communication will be crippled. It is vital and should be a main part in communication. In many ways, the consideration of testing and assessing listening ability parallels that of assessing reading. Both are receptive skills and both can be broken down in similar ways. For that reason, you should read this guide after or in conjunction with the guide to assessing reading ability. The essential difference between the skills is that the listener cannot move backwards and forwards through the text at will but must listen for the data in the order in and speed at which the speaker chooses to deliver them. In common with the assessment of reading skills, that of listening skills is, perforce, indirect. When someone speaks or writes, there is a discernible and accessible product. Merely watching people listen often tells us little or nothing about the level of comprehension they are achieving or the skills they are deploying. This accounts for the fact that both listening and speaking skills are often assessed simultaneously. In real life, listening is rarely practiced in isolation and the listener's response to what is heard is a reliable way to assess how much has been comprehended. Unit 2. The Listening Comprehension Skills The importance of recognizing context in listening means that the person can relate what they hear to the real world in which they live as they can symbolically recognize concepts with language and link them together in order to understand what they hear and give it a meaningful meaning. Avendaño, D. (2023) Listening comprehension is the ability to understand spoken language. It’s a complex process that involves hearing, understanding, and responding to what’s being said. The following listening comprehension skills are distinguished: Recognition: connecting, recognizing the components of a message (sounds, words, linguistic elements such as pronouns, verbs, among others). Selection: select the most important words in the message (names, verbs, key words among others), then group the selected details in level of importance. Interpretation: is the understanding of the information that was heard. This means knowing the intention and purpose of the message, its main ideas and the importance of the most significant part of the message the speaker is giving. What is active listening? Active listening does not come easily to us, so we must make conscious effort to practice it. It takes time to master and a lot of practice to become adept. Active listening is completely focusing on what is being said and absorbing it without bias, as opposed to simply glossing over the general message. Future Learn. (2023) 2 How can you improve your active listening skills? 1. Consider eye contact 2. Be alert, but not intense 3. Pay attention to nonverbal signs, such as body language and tone 4. Make a mental image of what the speaker is saying 5. Empathize with the speaker 6. Provide feedback 7. Keep an open mind Unit 3. Strategies in Teaching Listening Comprehension Listening strategies are techniques or activities that contribute directly to the comprehension and recall of listening input. Listening strategies can be classified by how the listener processes the input. Teaching listening requires a little more for the teacher than the learner. One of the principles of teaching listening should be "the material does not have to be visually displayed first." Suitable listening lessons go beyond the main listening task with related activities before and after the listening. (Permatasari, 2013). According to Brown (2007), the teacher should know some principles of teaching listening skills. The Strategy Used in Teaching Listening A listening strategy is a technique or activity that can help students develop their listening ability. So, these are some strategies that can develop students' ability in listening skills, according to J. Richard's (2008) theory: Bottom-up Processes The listener uses the process to collect the information piece-by-piece from the speech stream, going from the parts to the whole. Bottom-up processing is about perceiving and parsing the speech stream at an encouraged. Bottom-up processing trains listeners to incorporate word-for-word translation, adjusting to the speech rate, oral text repetition, and focusing more on prosodic features of the text (Abdalhamid et al., 2012). Top-down Processes This process involves the listeners' prior knowledge. Further, the listeners use their prior knowledge or knowledge about a specific context of communication to predict what information they will receive You should know that there are different types of listening: Listening for gist: you listen in order to understand the main idea of the text. Listening for specific information: you want to find out specific details, for example key words. Listening for detailed understanding: you want to understand all the information the text provides Strategies for Listening Comprehension 1. Use Listening Centers. 3  2. Prepare comprehension questions or talking points prior to reading. 3. Have comprehension practice ready for any book. Teaching Strategies To Improve Listening Skills Model Good Listening. It is said that you should demonstrate the skill to the class by drawing their attention to your listening with younger grades, and having older grades explain what effective listening looks like, sounds like, and feels like. Find Out About Your Student's Interests. Take a short time to find out about their interests, hobbies, music and sport, families etc. It will help you to understand that children will take heed to listen more to instructors they feel are interested in them and know them. Teacher should give students a voice about the issues that impact them. For their learning, their assessment, their classroom, and their school values pupils need to feel heard and understood. They will more promptly accept the status quo if they feel they have been heard. Students Should Talk Less. You need to mix up the activities in the class so that they are talking, writing, moving and listening in a variety of ways. Listen to What Students Think About Their Behavior You may find it unusual that listening to what students think and feel about the work they are asked to complete and the way they are being taught can give you clues as to your effectiveness as a teacher and how you could change things to more effectively assist student learning Unit 4. Assessment in Teaching Listening Comprehension Purpose of Listening Comprehension Test A listening comprehension test is used to assess and evaluate an individual's ability to understand and comprehend spoken English. The better the listening comprehension assessment, the better is a candidate’s proficiency in understanding and internalizing information and facts from customers/ clients and making the right decision. Listening Assessment Intensive Listening Intensive Listening is a typical assessment that assesses phonological and morphological elements of language. These assessments are great to assess students with past-tense markers as well as stressed and unstressed parts of words. 4  Recognizing Phonological and Morphological Elements. Paraphrase Recognition Responsive Listening This task is more authentic and more than likely used in an everyday setting inside or outside the classroom. It allows students to perform in a normal everyday English setting as well as teaches them functional tasks (i.e. asking for directions). Student’s responses are measured on how accurate they answered the question. Appropriate response to a question. Open ended response to a question. Selective Listening The third aspect of listening, selective listening is when a student listens to a piece of information and must discern specific information. Listening Cloze (Fill in the blank) Information transfer > Multiple-picture-cued selection > Single- picture-cued verbal multiple choide > Chart filling Extensive Listening Extensive listening tasks include lectures, long conversations, and lengthy messages that require listeners to decipher information and derive meaning. Dictation Dialogue & multiple-choice comprehension questions Unit 5. Problems and Challenges in Teaching Listening Comprehension Listening is one of the most fundamental pieces of learning and teaching language. In order to be successful in listening, learners should come up with some strategies such as taking notes during listening, making practice, or having methods for feeling themselves relaxed during listening. According to Kurita (2020) developing learners’ own strategies for listening enables them to be successful in listening. Vandergrift (2019) explains that learners should learn to listen so that they can better listen to learn. It reports that listening comes through four variables; the message, the speaker, the listener and the physical setting. That’s why when there is a problem in listening, it may seem hard to find out as there are a lot of factors which can easily affect the performance of listening. 5  According to Yilmaz & Yavuz (2020), there are several common difficulties that students face in listening comprehension, and teachers can play a crucial role in helping students overcome these challenges: Listening comprehension is a complex phenomenon. The learner of a foreign language has to face many difficulties. 1. Difficulties concerning sound: Sound difficulties may occur due to accent, intonation, stress, volume and clarity. There are many words which create problems for the listeners. 2. Difficulties regarding Words and Grammar: Lack of grammatical rules in conversation many cause difficulties. Some listening words have special meaning but listeners don't understand them. 3. Background Noise: Background noise and unfamiliar culture can also create problems for the listeners. 4. Experience Difficulties: If the listener is not familiar with topic or subject matter or the speaker and his way of speaking, he will not be able to respond properly. 5. Unfamiliar Vocabulary: When listening contains unknown words it would not be easy for listener to understand. If listeners don't know the meaning of words this can fall their interest and motivation and cannot have a positive impact on the listeners' listening ability. A lot of words have more than one meaning and if they are not used appropriately in their appropriate contexts listeners will get confused. 6. Length and Speed of Listening: The level of listeners can have a significant role when they listen to long parts and keep all information in their mind. It is very difficult for lower level listeners to listen more than three minutes long and complete the listening tasks. Speed can make listening passage difficult. If the speakers speak too fast students may have serious problems to understand L2 words. In this situation, listeners are not able to control the speed of speakers and this can create critical problems with listening comprehension. 7. Lack of Time: Any conversation where one or both parties are worried about the time available is bound to suffer from listening problems. Difficulty of time is mostly found in business context. Teaching listening comprehension is a complex task, and educators must address several challenges and problems to help students become proficient listeners. So we as future educators should ensure that listening comprehension receives the attention and resources it deserves in language education to facilitate better language learning outcomes.\ 6 7