Keywords: learning language, reading and writing skills, communication skills.
Today's information technology epoch has made foreign language skills a necessity. English is widely studied and used worldwide as the language of international economic, business and trade relations. There are different types of language teaching methodology.
When teaching a foreign language, the teacher aims to develop the four main skills of the language: listening, speaking, reading and writing. Students must learn the grammar and vocabulary of the target language through listening, speaking, reading and writing.
Listening is one of the most common and widely used methods when learning a foreign language. According to scientists, adults spend half of their communication listening. Pupils and students receive 90 % of the information they receive by listening to their teachers or each other. Often, language learners are unaware of how much effort they are putting into developing their listening skills. The level of listening is not the same in all situations, for example, if we compare listening to one-on-one in ordinary everyday interactions, listening to general lessons or listening to a scientist talk about problems in science, these levels can be distinguished. Language learners, on the other hand, are required to have attentive listening skills that focus on recognizing sounds and making sense of them.
Active listening is a valuable communication skill. According to scientists, we spend half of our life listening.
Listening involves paying closer attention to what we hear and being influenced by it. We usually only accept 50 % of what we hear. After two days, we forget half of it, 25 %. But why is listening important?
Active listening helps to understand what is being said and improves thinking skills and improves interpersonal communication. It helps to control communication time, because the person knows how to listen and how to accept what he hears. Active listening enhances mutual understanding between people.
There are several methods and ways to help students develop their listening skills. Listening is more complex than reading, writing, or speaking. Teachers should pay attention to the following situations that will promote attentive listening in primary groups:
— In order for students to listen attentively, a comfortable atmosphere should be created in the auditorium;
— The teacher should understand that it is necessary to listen to audio and video recordings of people who are native speakers of the target language, and that it is enough to listen to students for 2–3 minutes in elementary groups.
— The information provided to the students should be relevant and reliable to the level of knowledge of the group.
— The teacher needs to come up with ways to develop students' attentive listening skills.
— The teacher should improve the methods aimed at developing students' attentive listening skills and monitor their use.
When teaching a foreign language, the work to be done when using the listening methodology includes three periods, called post-listening periods.
In the pre-listening phase, firstly, the teacher should discuss with the students through questions related to the given topic, encourage them to listen and prepare a soft pre-presentation. The teacher then discusses, explains, and helps students resolve a number of lexical and grammatical difficulties in the information to be presented to the students. All these activities are aimed at helping students to overcome possible difficulties during the listening period and to make the post-listening period more effective.
During the listening session, the teacher should use effective techniques based mainly on the listening comprehension principle and students should:
— The ability to understand the general direction of the information being communicated;
— Ability to understand areas of particular focus;
— The ability to check prior knowledge that contradicts what is being said;
— Develop the ability to understand the speaker's intent.
A listening event consists of three parties: the sender, the message, and the receiver. As soon as a message arrives, listeners should focus their attention on that message only, and not be distracted by previous or subsequent messages. In addition, students should be able to understand the sender's choice and use of words, sentence structure, intonation and pronunciation.
During the post-listening period, the focus should be on verifying and reinforcing the result. Based on what they have heard, students can freely and freely speak on the given topic and record a short essay or statement.
When learning a foreign language, the complexity of the listening process increases. Teachers and students fully and correctly understand the importance of listening in language learning and teaching, and listening carefully helps them learn a foreign language better.
Listening is one of the first and most important means of developing speaking skills. It may be useful to provide students with recordings of news, advertisements, poetry readings, stories, singing, telephone conversations, dialogues, and monologues as English conversations.
When teaching a foreign language, listening requires students to pay close attention. Unlike written text, if you don't pay attention to the information presented to you or if you don't understand a part of it, there is no opportunity to re-read it, which makes it difficult to fully understand the information. Therefore, the teacher should teach students to pay more attention to the information presented to them.
Using different types of listening helps teachers better understand the target language, and helps language learners understand and communicate fluently with native speakers of the language they are learning.
References:
- Stephen E. Lucas, the Art of Public speaking, USA, 1998.
- World Book Encyclopedia, Vol.1 NY. 1993.
