Theoretical bases of teaching listening - Курсовая работа

Listeners often must process messages as they come, even if they are still processing what they have just heard, without backtracking or looking ahead. In addition, listeners must cope with the senders choice of vocabulary, structure, and rate of delivery. The complexity of the listening process is magnified in second language contexts, where the receiver also has incomplete control of the language [2, p. 226]. Given the importance of listening in language learning and teaching it is essential for language teachers to help their students become effective listeners. In the communicative approach to language teaching, this means modeling listening strategies and providing listening practice in authentic situations: those that learners are likely to encounter when they use the language outside the classroom. Instructors 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-relevant information, and tolerate less than word-by-word comprehension. In Listening classes, students are usually given practice in listening but they are not actually taught listening. Practice is not enough. Research and case studies have told us many things about how listening should be taught. But often, this knowledge has not made the jump into classroom practice. While many classes are based on the idea of giving students lots of practice with English, research tells us that we also need to teach listening. In addition to giving students plenty of listening practices. We should also break the skill of listening into micro-skill components and make sure that our students are aware of what they need to know to understand how to listen to English. Students need to know and understand: - how words link together (liaison); - how vowels weaken (the central vowel); - how sounds mix together (assimilation); - how sounds disappear (elision); - how syllables disappear (ellipsis); - how helping sounds are used between vowel sounds (intrusion); - how intonation helps with conversational turn taking (intonation); - how stress signals new information (prominence); - how to use grammar to help guess meaning (strategies); - how to use discourse knowledge to help guess meaning (strategies); - how to use knowledge of intonation and stress to guess meaning (strategies). 1.2 Teacher’s speech as basic form of teaching listening comprehension Teaching is a very complicated complex process. Its success depends on several factors. One of the most important factors is a teacher himself or herself. There are three main activities that teachers have to manage simultaneously: - managing the group; - managing activities; - managing the learning. In many group teaching situations, the role of the teacher is that of facilitator of learning: leading discussions, asking open-ended questions, guiding process and task, and enabling active participation of learners and engagement with ideas. However, small groups function and behave in various ways and have different purposes. Teachers therefore need to be able to adopt a range of roles and skills to suit specific situations, often during the same teaching session. According to McCrorie the roles that may be adopted include that of: - the instructor, who imparts information to students; - the neutral chair; - the consultant, from whom learners can ask questions; - the devil’s advocate; - the commentator; - the wanderer, such as in a larger workshop; - the absent friend [8, p. 6]. Making the shift from teacher as expert to facilitator is sometimes seen as diminishing a teacher’s power and authority, but this should not be the case. Facilitating learning is empowering for both the learner and the teacher and frees the teacher from many of the burdens that having to be an expert might entail. It would traditionally have been seen as a weakness for a teacher to say I don’t know, let’s find out or I don’t know, do any of you students know the answer? and clearly clinical teachers need to know more about many topics than their students or trainees, but medical science is changing so rapidly that no one can know everything. Implementing an evidence-based approach to clinical learning and to medical practice involves finding out about the latest research. You can use these techniques and this approach to facilitate your own and your students’/trainees’ learning [9, p. 16]. Practical learning a foreign language is possible only under condition when it is used as a mean of communication. A lesson has a lot of opportunities for using a language as a mean of communication between a teacher and a student. While choosing material for a lesson a teacher should take into account certain purposes of a lesson: a) developing listening comprehension; b) broadening passi