Listen up!

Hello!

As you may well know, listening is one of the four macro skills we need to develop as we are learning a new language. For some people, this may prove to be a daunting experience, but is this really so?

Read the extract from a book below and give your opinions on this matter.

Reasons for listening

Most students want to be able to understand what people are saying to them in English, either face-to-face, on TV or on the radio, in theatres and cinemas, or on tape, CDs or other recorded media. Anything we can do to make that easier will be useful for them. This is especially important since, as we said on page 78, the way people speak is often significantly different from the way they write.

Listening is good for our students’ pronunciation, too, in that the more they hear and understand English being spoken, the more they absorb appropriate pitch and intonation, stress and the sounds of both individual words and those which blend together in connected speech. Listening texts are good pronunciation models, in other words, and the more students listen, the better they get, not only at understanding speech, but also at speaking themselves. Indeed, it is worth remembering that successful spoken communication depends not just on our ability to speak, but also on the effectiveness of the way we listen.

One of the main sources of listening for students is the voice of their teacher (see page 37 for a discussion of the way teachers should talk to students). However, it is important, where possible, for students to be exposed to more than just that one voice, with all its idiosyncrasies. There is nothing wrong with an individual teacher’s voice, of course, but as we saw on page 79, there are significant regional variations in the way people speak English in a country like Britain. For example, the ‘a’ of ‘bath’ is pronounced like the vowel sound in ‘park’ in some parts of Britain, but like the ‘a’ in ‘cat’ in others. In grammar, certain varieties of English within the British Isles use ‘done’ in sentences like ‘I done it yesterday’ where other varieties would find such tense usage unacceptable. In vocabulary, ‘happen’ is a verb in standard southern English, but in parts of Yorkshire (in northern England) it is often used as an adverb to mean ‘maybe’ or ‘perhaps’ in sentences such as ‘Happen it’ll rain’. And if there are many regional varieties in just one country, it is obvious that the different Englishes around the world will be many and varied. Students need to be exposed to different Englishes, but teachers need to exercise judgment about the number (and degree) of the varieties which they hear. A lot will depend on the students’ level of competence, and on what variety or varieties they have so far been exposed to.  (Harmer: 133)

From: Harmer, J. How to Teach English (2007). Pearson Education Limited.

1. How do you feel about listening?
2. What type of listening activities are you usually involved with in your everyday life?
3. Do you ever listen to English outside your class?
4. What do you do to cope with the difficulties that listening presents to you?