Due to the growing demand of students in mastering the English language thanks to its role of the international language of communication discussed issues related to the teaching of foreign language speech perception in high school. Review the effectiveness of the forms and methods of teaching students' listening skills in English in the classroom in high school. There feature and the role of audition process. The characteristic of audio texts reflects the real-life situation. Isolated and analyzed a number of problems and difficulties faced by students in teaching listening.
Owing to growing demand in mastering the English language as a language of international communication, the questions connected with enhancing teaching listening comprehension practice in a higher school are discussed. There are serious problems concerning these questions. The poor listening comprehension ability of students is referred to. Consequently, the authors are going to contemplate on its reasons, review some effective forms and methods in the teaching of foreign language listening skills at a non-linguistic higher school. This article investigates the peculiarity and role of listening comprehension practice. The characteristic of audio-texts depicting real-life situations is given. A range of problems and difficulties, which students of higher school can face in teaching listening, are considered and analyzed. Some measures how to organize the listening comprehension process in class in the required way are recommended to be taken. The authors have also made some efforts on presenting the recommendations on encouraging the ability to realize a foreign speech.
The growing interest in oral expression of English, ability to understand and participate in acts of communication is now one of the major issues in foreign language learning, which requires the teacher much more focus on listening in the classroom. Therefore, any attempt to facilitate the teacher's listening will undoubtedly be useful for students. The purpose of this article — reveals the specifics of listening, to identify the difficulties encountered by students in the process of listening, and propose ways to resolve them. For a long time listening to the methodical literature considered do not use the proper attention (Neglected) aspect of the training (learning) a foreign language by teacher. This is explained by the fact that listening skills will automatically develop in students by immersing them in the language and practice, while working on the grammatical, lexical and phonetic material. Currently, members of the public need to develop a high level of ownership of the process of listening, because they want to learn to understand that they speak English in a personal conversation at business meetings, on television, in the theater, watching movies, traveling to foreign countries, listening to the record, and so on.
Listening — is a complex process for learning and teaching, as while listening involves mental processes such as listening and learning; Attention; probabilistic forecasting; semantic conjecture; segmentation of speech flow; informative analysis; the final synthesis, assuming all sorts of compression and interpretation of the perceived message. To master this kind of speech activity, it is necessary to achieve integration listening skills. E. Driven to automatism ability error-free, rapid, simultaneous perception and recognition of the phonetic code, and receptive vocabulary and grammar skills. In one of his recent publications, M. Height described the audition: «it is a necessary form of speech activity, because it provides the listener information. Without an understanding of the information, no study cannot start»... For a successful teacher training to audition must understand and accept the features of this type of speech activity.
Due to the complexity of this process of listening among students, there are many obstacles to understanding the speech of native speakers. Difficulties cause feelings of uncertainty and even fear. The task of the teacher is to address these difficulties and in the formation of the ability to understand foreign language speech. There are questions which need to create conditions for comfortable listening, how to instill confidence in students, listening to authentic spoken language? This article provides guidance to these and other closely related issues.
Recent research in the field of audition offer useful information for students through the process of proper organization of the Audi-visual lesson. As noted in our work Schank, many situations in which people are faced with the hearing process, to some extent predictable, because they take place according to the established script (script). He describes how the procedures laid down in these scenarios is stored in memory, defining it as «an elaborate chain of universal», giving the world's human knowledge and global experience of frequently used situations. Knowledge of these scenarios equips us to understand what is happening in the world around us in different situations. Typical scenarios of this kind include the following: passenger conversation and manager at the front desk at the airport (a greeting, please submit a ticket, questions regarding the number of luggage and security information about the departure flight, etc...); buy a train ticket, or any other form of transport, visiting the doctor, going to the restaurant, shopping for clothes or food items, buying or renting and rent an apartment, at the post office and many others. The main idea of this conclusion is that the accumulation of the largest possible number of such scenarios enriches the students’ knowledge about the objects and phenomena of national culture and knowledge of generally accepted norms of behavior in the country, allowing them to better understand the stories or listening in the communication process. They are already partially prepared students for the audition. In this regard for successful mastery of the skills of listening placed greater priority to listen to stories of real-life situations (real-life listening situations), common to the peoples of every culture.
In fact, the purpose of the practice of listening comprehension in the classroom is to ensure that students, once in the specific situations of real communication, they were able to successfully navigate. And if so, then it is worth considering two very important details related questions:
1) What features have a real-life situation?
2) How to organize and listen to all vital real-life situations in particular taking into account their specific features.
To address these issues, it is necessary to designate a circle of typical situations in which some people listen to others. Of course, here, and will include a situation where not only the hearing process is involved, but also other kinds of speech activity, generally speaking. But the main thing in them is that the person needs to be able to understand what he is told, and to adequately respond to this question
The list of typical situations can be represented as follows: interviews, various instructions, Loudspeaker announcements, radio news, theatrical performance, a telephone conversation, a conversation, watching television, in-store, etc. It is important to note that most of these situations combine characteristics:
− Informal speech (informal speech), which, in turn, has specific characteristics that cause difficulties for students, such as:
- Brevity (brevity of «chunks»). It is usually divided into short pieces (chunks). The two sides take turns being transferred short phrases;
- Pronunciation (pronunciation). Some words are often swallowed (slurred), they differ markedly from their phonological representations in the dictionary. For example, «can not» to cannot, «aright for» all right, or «Shall» we go? for «Shall we go?»;
- Vocabulary (vocabulary). Conversational style. For example, the word «guy», where the letter we would use «man», or «kid» for «child»;
- Grammar (grammar). The informal speeches tend to use ungrammatical (ungrammatical) structures: statements do not have a clear division of the proposals pending proposals;
- Noise (noise). Words spoken vaguely or not known to the listener, or the diffused attention because of the background noise;
- Redundancy (redundancy). Generally speaking, in his speech use more words than necessary to transmit the message. Excessiveness includes the following: You can repeat words, amendment, speech fillers, such as: I mean, well, okay and others.
How to cope with the identified problems?
Firstly, it is necessary to bring these features to the attention of students, constantly paying attention when listening audio texts. Secondly, at the moment there are huge students’ accesses to the Internet via the foreign literature. For independent work within the framework of project work can be given the task to identify the features of informal speech, leading a conversation with a native speaker, watching movies or listening to the songs. Such assignments cause students are much more interesting than Audio Texts from the textbook; expectations, the goal (expectation and purpose) Listen almost always know in advance, with whom he will speak or what to be talking. He usually has a specific purpose, such as to find out something, respectively, waiting to hear the information, he needs.
Therefore, before listening to any text in students definitely should have a notion of the nature of the text, they will listen. For example, an ordinary teacher instructed (that we often see in the classroom), «Listen to this passage» would be much less useful than words «Now you listen to the text about how a husband and wife discuss their plans for the upcoming summer vacation». This attitude of the students will be more effective because it activates its own knowledge (scenarios): before the eyes swim any event images, episodes associated with summer vacation. Based on this experience, students build their expectation, prediction of events, which help them to understand the proposed text for listening.
Of course, listening in the classroom is not a real life situation. However, in order to teach students to perceive speech on the rumor that will prepare them for the perception outside the classroom, they need to know the characteristics of these situations and be prepared to cope with them in real life.
Many who study a foreign language do not realize that when they listen to their native language, in fact, they do not listen to every word, in fact, they underestimate the fact that we closely link the linguistic knowledge with our (current) experience and knowledge of concepts as the theme and culture. This means that they are often there are some unrealistic expectations and therefore they try to understand every word audio text.
The concern is compounded by the wrong organization of students assignments to listening text in class, not linked with the text, or the preparation for it by intensifying prior knowledge (as we noted earlier), in other words, tasks such as: «Listen to the text and answer the questions». Such a task, rather, is the controlling nature than training. To develop in students a sense of self-care should be taken to establish a positive listening experience in class. In the authors' opinion, this can be achieved as follows:
− How to listen more in class and independently. to listen to texts is a good model for pronunciation. It follows that the more often students listen to audio texts, the better they not only understand the foreign language speech, but also sharpen themselves, i. e., to improve your pronunciation... You should always remember that successful communication depends not only on the ability to speak, but also on how effectively; we are able to listen and understand the foreign language speech;
− Pick up cool stuff for listening;
− To set clear objectives for students;
− Develop job as understanding of the content, and the involvement of students in the process of discussion after listening. In this setup give students that they will have the opportunity to discuss their answers in pairs before they will be performing in front of the whole group (for removal of fear), which obviously will help them eliminate some doubts. But here are mainly the students to first understand what it is about, and then find out what impressed them the content.
The concern is compounded by the wrong organization of students Thus, perhaps the most important factor is to learn to listen more effectively, it is a self-learner. And confidence can only come with practice from the earliest stage of education. The role of the teacher is to create for the students as much as possible good practices of perception of foreign speech at the hearing; give them the opportunity to feel pleasure from the fact that the foreign language they understand it; provide relevant audio material in the classroom; configure them to use all available resources available online; put before the students clear objectives and the right team to listening; develop job involvement of students in the process of discussion.
References:
- Hedge T. Teaching and learning in the language classroom. Oxford: OUP, 2008. P. 227–258.
- Richards J. C. «Listening comprehension: approach, design, procedure». In: M. H. Long and J. C. Richards (eds.), Methodology in TESOL: A Book of Readings. Heinle and Publishers, 1987. P. 161–176.
- Rivers W., Temperley M. 1978. A practical guide in the teaching of English. New York: Oxford University Press; Celce-Murcia. 1995. «Discourse analysis and the teaching of listening» in G. Cook and B. Seidlhofer (eds.). P. 363–377.
- Brown G. Twenty-five years of teaching listening comprehension // Forum. 1987. 25, 4. P. 11–15.
- Anderson A., Lynch T. Listening. Oxford: OUP, 1993.
