In teaching listening I find the main problems my students have with listening:
- The content is usually not well organized. In many cases listeners cannot predict ...
In teaching listening I find the main problems my students have with listening:
- The content is usually not well organized. In many cases listeners cannot predict what speakers are going to say, whether it is a news report on the radio, an interviewer’s questions, an everyday conversation, etc.
- Learners tend to be used to their teacher’s accent or to the standard variety of British or American English. They find it hard to understand speakers with other accents.
- Messages on the radio or recorded on tape cannot be listened to at a slower speed. Even in conversation it is impossible to ask the speaker to repeat something as many times as the interlocutor might like.
In order to show this problems I do that:
- Select short, simple listening texts with little redundancy for lower-level students and complicated authentic materials with more redundancy for advanced learners
- Try to find visual aids or draw pictures and diagrams associated with the listening topics to help students guess or imagine actively.
- Design task-oriented exercises to engage the students’ interest and help them learn listening skills subconsciously. Select short, simple listening texts with little redundancy for lower-level students and complicated authentic materials with more redundancy for advanced learners
- Make students aware of different native-speaker accents.