Teaching Listening
Some considerations for teaching this skill
By Daniel de Jesús Víquez-Vargas
Pre-Service Teacher, School of English
Faculty of Social Sciences
Universidad Latina de Costa Rica
Sunday, May 8, 2016
Post 271
The
base of an effective communication is good listening. Listening is, and I
correct myself, the most important skill of the four. You learn a lot by
reading, and most people aim at developing good speaking skills. However, they
will not be able to achieve anything without the understanding of the language,
and so listening is the only skill that provides it. How are we supposed to
answer someone’s questions if we are not able to understand what they are
saying? This chapter of the book from Jeremy Harmer (2007), Teaching Listening,
provides good points of view of what we have to do in order to help our
students to develop good listening skills.
In
this chapter Harmer (2007) deals with the different techniques that we as
future teachers can use and with some recommendations about different factors
that we must consider. The good news about the listening is that we can find
material everywhere; we can use songs, videos, material from the Internet, and
we can even create our own material recording ourselves or even bringing a
guest. And if the guest is a native speaker, it is even better for foreigner to
interact face to face with the students. Also we can create different scenarios
in which they had to be in real life situations like -for example- buying
things in a supermarket, buying tickets in a train stations or asking for
directions. Of course, we have to take in considerations the students level.
Another
important thing that Harmer’s (2007) insightful chapter mentions is that
students must be exposed to different accents and different tones and voices. This
is very important for their listening skills development and consolidation. In
my personal opinion, there are no drawbacks presented in this chapter; we must
encourage students to work in their listening skills in the intensive and the
extensive way. As everything in life, listening comprehension is a process and
will take time to be built in, but little by little students will improve and
get better at it.
To sum
up, listening is by far the most
important skill in language learning. In my personal opinion, in the process of
learning a language, listening is the key to an effective communication, and we
cannot communicate if we cannot understand what we are listening to. In term of
finding material for our class, the chance to get recording is too broad and
diverse; we can find material for listening activities almost everywhere and
even bring people to interact face to face with the students.
References
Harmer, J. (2007). “Teaching Listening”. How
to teach English Essex: Pearson.
Sunday, May 08, 2016
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