English
Tiếng Việt
Some Important Factors in Developing English Listening Comprehension Skills
Posted date 04/03/2016
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Posted date 04/03/2016
1.797 view
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In the current trend of globalization, the importance of English cannot be denied and ignored because it is widely used in all fields in the world. In that context, teaching and learning English is given attention in Vietnam in general, and especially at Dai Nam University. Among the four English communication skills, Listening and Speaking skills are focused on and developed for students the most.
Ms. Vu Thi Thanh Mai
Faculty of Foreign Languages - Dai Nam University
Faculty of Foreign Languages - Dai Nam University
I. Problem statement
In the current trend of globalization, the importance of English cannot be denied and ignored because it is widely used in all fields in the world. In that context, teaching and learning English is given attention in Vietnam in general, and especially at Dai Nam University. Of the four English communication skills, Listening and Speaking skills are given the most attention and development for students. Our teaching experience and discussions with students show that listening comprehension is one of the relatively difficult skills to grasp and improve for English learners, especially in the early stages. Some important factors analyzed below hope to help improve students' listening comprehension when learning English.
B. Some important factors when listening to English
1. Vocabulary
According to Grabe (1991), vocabulary development is an important factor contributing to language development in foreign language learning. Lack of vocabulary is a major obstacle for students in the process of learning English in general and listening and speaking skills in particular. Students should improve by listening to words many times in a sentence or in different sentences in a lesson. When listening and understanding the meaning of a word in a specific sentence, you will remember the word and the whole sentence and can reuse the structure of that sentence later. When you hear a new word, you should not look it up in the dictionary immediately. Instead, you should try to guess the meaning of the word. We can guess the word by finding the correlation of the word in the whole sentence based on the topic of the lesson, or other relationships such as details, objects, etc. that appear in the listening passage. Guessing words and increasing your vocabulary by repeating words in different examples are two easy ways to increase your vocabulary to improve your listening skills.
2. Listen for Context
What is contextual listening? Imagine there is a passage in the listening passage: "... I bought this great tuner at JR's. It was really cheap and now I can finally listen to National Public Radio broadcasts." At first, you may not understand what " tuner" means. If you focus too much on finding out the meaning of the word "tuner" , you may feel stuck. However, if you put the word " tuner" into context, you can understand it easily. In this case, the word bought is the past form of the verb buy , and the word listen is easy to understand. So, you can understand He bought something - the tuner? - to listen to the radio ( he bought " tuner" to listen to the radio), so " tuner" must be a type of " device" (amplifier) used to support listening, the word "tuner" only contributes to building but does not determine the information of the sentence. This is just a simple example to illustrate why you need to focus on words you know , not words you don't know.
3. Listen for Keywords
In general, no one can listen and understand all the words in a sentence, especially a long sentence. Using keywords (usually verbs, nouns, adjectives, adverbs) or keyword phrases helps you understand the main idea of the text. For example, when listening to a sentence, for example, " I went on a business trip to New York last year" if you know how to focus on the meaning of the words "New York", "business", "last" you can guess that people are talking about last year's business trip to New York and revolve around the topic of "business trip" if you know how to focus on keywords, it can be said that, you will understand the main idea of the listening and from there you can understand the details of the content of this listening.
4. Enhancing background knowledge
Background knowledge or basic knowledge plays an important role in the listening comprehension process. Some recent researchers have shown that background (basic) knowledge about a topic has a great influence on the listening comprehension process (Stahl, Hare, Sinatra, & Gregory, 1991; Stahl & Jacobson, 1986; Stahl, Jacobson, Davis, & Davis, 1989). The studies of these authors show that the more knowledge students have about the topic of the listening passage, the higher their ability to understand the listening passage. English learners may know all the words in the listening passage, but if their background knowledge about the topic of the listening passage is absent or very little, their listening comprehension ability will be very limited. To expand the basic knowledge for listening comprehension, you should increase reading and listening to a lot of information about different fields to serve your entertainment and understanding needs under the conditions allowed.
III. In lieu of conclusion
Listening to English is not as difficult as some English learners often think. The four basic elements mentioned above will hopefully help students develop and strengthen their English listening skills during their studies, in daily communication as well as when they apply them in their future work. Please apply the above sharing and add more listening experience to get better results in your studies as well as in your future work. Wish you all the best!
References
1. Grabe, William. (1991). Current developmentsin second language reading research.
2. Stahl, SA, & Jacobson, MG (1986).Vocabulary difficulty, prior knowledge, and text comprehension. Journal of Reading Behavior , 18 309-324
3. Stahl, S.A., Jacobson, M.G., Davis, C.E., & Davis, R. (1989). Prior knowledge and difficult vocabulary in the comprehension of unfamiliar text. Reading Research Quarterly , 24, 27-43.
In the current trend of globalization, the importance of English cannot be denied and ignored because it is widely used in all fields in the world. In that context, teaching and learning English is given attention in Vietnam in general, and especially at Dai Nam University. Of the four English communication skills, Listening and Speaking skills are given the most attention and development for students. Our teaching experience and discussions with students show that listening comprehension is one of the relatively difficult skills to grasp and improve for English learners, especially in the early stages. Some important factors analyzed below hope to help improve students' listening comprehension when learning English.
B. Some important factors when listening to English
1. Vocabulary
According to Grabe (1991), vocabulary development is an important factor contributing to language development in foreign language learning. Lack of vocabulary is a major obstacle for students in the process of learning English in general and listening and speaking skills in particular. Students should improve by listening to words many times in a sentence or in different sentences in a lesson. When listening and understanding the meaning of a word in a specific sentence, you will remember the word and the whole sentence and can reuse the structure of that sentence later. When you hear a new word, you should not look it up in the dictionary immediately. Instead, you should try to guess the meaning of the word. We can guess the word by finding the correlation of the word in the whole sentence based on the topic of the lesson, or other relationships such as details, objects, etc. that appear in the listening passage. Guessing words and increasing your vocabulary by repeating words in different examples are two easy ways to increase your vocabulary to improve your listening skills.
2. Listen for Context
What is contextual listening? Imagine there is a passage in the listening passage: "... I bought this great tuner at JR's. It was really cheap and now I can finally listen to National Public Radio broadcasts." At first, you may not understand what " tuner" means. If you focus too much on finding out the meaning of the word "tuner" , you may feel stuck. However, if you put the word " tuner" into context, you can understand it easily. In this case, the word bought is the past form of the verb buy , and the word listen is easy to understand. So, you can understand He bought something - the tuner? - to listen to the radio ( he bought " tuner" to listen to the radio), so " tuner" must be a type of " device" (amplifier) used to support listening, the word "tuner" only contributes to building but does not determine the information of the sentence. This is just a simple example to illustrate why you need to focus on words you know , not words you don't know.
3. Listen for Keywords
In general, no one can listen and understand all the words in a sentence, especially a long sentence. Using keywords (usually verbs, nouns, adjectives, adverbs) or keyword phrases helps you understand the main idea of the text. For example, when listening to a sentence, for example, " I went on a business trip to New York last year" if you know how to focus on the meaning of the words "New York", "business", "last" you can guess that people are talking about last year's business trip to New York and revolve around the topic of "business trip" if you know how to focus on keywords, it can be said that, you will understand the main idea of the listening and from there you can understand the details of the content of this listening.
4. Enhancing background knowledge
Background knowledge or basic knowledge plays an important role in the listening comprehension process. Some recent researchers have shown that background (basic) knowledge about a topic has a great influence on the listening comprehension process (Stahl, Hare, Sinatra, & Gregory, 1991; Stahl & Jacobson, 1986; Stahl, Jacobson, Davis, & Davis, 1989). The studies of these authors show that the more knowledge students have about the topic of the listening passage, the higher their ability to understand the listening passage. English learners may know all the words in the listening passage, but if their background knowledge about the topic of the listening passage is absent or very little, their listening comprehension ability will be very limited. To expand the basic knowledge for listening comprehension, you should increase reading and listening to a lot of information about different fields to serve your entertainment and understanding needs under the conditions allowed.
III. In lieu of conclusion
Listening to English is not as difficult as some English learners often think. The four basic elements mentioned above will hopefully help students develop and strengthen their English listening skills during their studies, in daily communication as well as when they apply them in their future work. Please apply the above sharing and add more listening experience to get better results in your studies as well as in your future work. Wish you all the best!
References
1. Grabe, William. (1991). Current developmentsin second language reading research.
2. Stahl, SA, & Jacobson, MG (1986).Vocabulary difficulty, prior knowledge, and text comprehension. Journal of Reading Behavior , 18 309-324
3. Stahl, S.A., Jacobson, M.G., Davis, C.E., & Davis, R. (1989). Prior knowledge and difficult vocabulary in the comprehension of unfamiliar text. Reading Research Quarterly , 24, 27-43.
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