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