Trabajo de revisión
Departamento de Idioma Inglés. Facultad de Ciencias Médicas de Holguín.
"The importance of listening comprehension in the learning of the English language."
Lic. Nelson Velázquez Hechavarría y Lic. Roberto Sánchez.
Profesores de Lengua Inglesa. Facultad de Ciencias Médicas de Holguín.
Any modern man needs to know at least a foreign language besides his own, not only as a means of cultural enrichment but for the practical reason of getting in touch with the socio-political and scientific-economical activity of other cultures. For this reason in recent years scientists and phylosophers have aimed a bit more of their attention to the problems of communication.
We cannot expect our learners to speak English without first of all hearing English. The language heard acts as a model for the spoken language to follow. However, the relationship is not direct between the heard "input" and the spoken"output". So given the spoken input. What does the learner do?. Until he is at a fairly advanced level he finds difficulty in understanding everything bombarding his ears. He in fact hears, that is, he perceives only restricted number of items.
A useful the distinction is sometimes needed between the terms "input" and "intake".
The first refers to the external data, the controlled or uncontrolled message, whereas "intake" refers to what the learner perceives, what his mind is capable of absorbing. So, given a certain "input" the "intake" will vary according to the ability of the learner.
To give an example: For many years on BBC TV there has been a program for children called "Jackanory", in which somebody tells or reads a different story every day for about 15 minutes. This program is very popular with children of all ages, so it is common to see five-year-olds watching together with twelve-year-olds all deep in attention listening to the same story. But obviously, the twelve-year-olds will perceive much more than the five-year-olds because these latter are able to take in, select, much less.
Certain implications for ear training arise from the following observations:
1.- Since listening precedes and affects speaking, we must aim at providing our learners with accurate and clear models.
2.- Sufficient listening time should be given before we demand production from our learners.
3.- Awareness of the sound system of the mother tongue of the learner will often help the teacher to provide appropriate practice.
Despite their own experience in learning foreign languages many people think that listening and comprehending is certainly much easier than speaking or writing. This may be because in most cases the act of comprehending causes us much less trouble. It is much less public than speaking or writing where our performance, mistakes and all is available for inspection. It is much easier to cover up our errors of comprehension. For the most, we can imagine to ourselves that we have understood the "gist" of what we heard and as long as we smile, nod occasionally and look attentive, no one else will actually know how much or how little we have understood.
This probably explains why many teachers overestimate their students' abilities in listening comprehension. The process of comprehension being part of learning is invisible, all we can observe is evidence that it has or has not taken place, and in many occasions this evidence is easy to fake, and in the classroom it is particularly easy to copy it from others who have understood.
To give and example: You go into a beginners' class at the start of a lesson and say: "Please, sit down every one and listen to me". Immediately every one sits down and looks attentive. "Does this mean they understood what you said?" May be, or may be a few did and the rest followed their example, or may be nobody understood what you said but they understood that you were a teacher, that you had said something, that the lesson was about to begin and that they should behave as they normally would at the beginning of a lesson.
I am not saying that it is a waste of time to give such instructions in English, but that the response to classroom instructions is not always evidence of comprehension of the language used. In fact, when we are faced with situations where a great deal depends on accurate comprehension we realize that it is not easy at all.
Most people who have had to operate in a foreign language in other countries can recall incidence which prove this fact.
Douglas McKeating, author of the chapter "Understanding and listening" from the book "The teaching of English as an international language" reveals us his own experience: My own moment of truth and panic came in a French suburban station, when I just didn't know whether the loudspeakers were telling me to change trains or stay on the one I was on.
Such incidents should remind us that our students too need much more specific concentrated listening practice.
In the last 10 years listening comprehension has begun to be taken seriously. Previously where there was no interest at all, it seemed to be assumed that the student would just pick it up somehow in the general process of learning the foreign laguage. It seemed reasonable to assume that he would learn to understand as he learned to speak it and that anyway he would understand the language addressed to him by his teacher.
Unfortunately this apparently natural process does not seem to produce the desired results, and there are a number of reasons for this:
1.- The student is taught to speak slowly and clearly and his teacher generally addresses the class in a public style which is clear and slow.
2.- Native speakers most of the time do not speak slowly or clearly.
3.- The student is often exposed only to one accent of English, the one spoken by his teacher and as spoken by his teacher.
For these reasons the normal habits of simplification which characterize the accent may be lost when the teacher speaks
slowly and artificially clear, and the students get used to a model of speech where every segment is clearly articulated.
If we remain aware of this process of understanding what we hear as a process of arriving at a reasonable interpretation of what the speaker intended to communicate, we can avoid considering comprehension as a 100 percent notion because what native speakers operate with are partial reasonable interpretations of what they are listening to and they have confidence in their ability to understand what they hear without totally comprehending everything that reaches their ears.
If the ability to understand the spoken form of the foreign language is not acquired naturally,What must be done then,it is obvious that this ability must be taught.
When listening,the learner should be helped to hear and respond to the following:
1.-The phonemic sounds of the language,and at upper levels,the personal or dialectical variations of the phonemes as spoken by native speakers.
2.-The sequences of sounds and the ways they group the lengths of pauses,patterns of stress and intonation,the elisions and contractions.
3.-The structure words and their required sound changes depending on their position before other words. e.g. A man- An animal- man- animal.
4.-Inflections for plurality, tense, possession, etc.
5.-The sound changes brought about by derivation.e g justice,[to] be just, unjust, justly.
6.-The structural patterns[of verb groups, of prepositional phrases]
7.-The word order clues to grammatical function and meaning.e.g. The bus station/the station bus.
8.-The meaning of the word depending on the context or in the situation discussed.e.g.the head of the statue/the table/the staff.
9.-The formulas, introductory words, idiomatic expressions and hesitation words which occur in speech.
10.Numbers, dates, days and names.
The learners'ability to comprehend [to decode] any utterance or longer text will depend on several factors:
a) His familiarity with the elements listed before.
b) His ability to recognize redundant clues in the message.
c) His ability to guess or to make hypotheses about some unfamiliar word or group of words from its position in the context.
d) His expectation because he may have faced that situation several times in a variety of listening tasks.
To sum up all I have said and for all of these facts I think that we should adopt as our first principle the maxim that people learn to do something by doing it, SO PEOPLE LEARN TO LISTEN BY LISTENING.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Lic. Nelson Velázquez Hechavarría. Dpto. Idioma Inglés. FCM Holguín.
Ave. Lenin # 4. Holguín 80 100. Cuba.
E_mail: rev-adm@cristal.hlg.sld.cu