Teaching listening

Taken from http://www.pathstoliteracy.org/strategies/listening-skills

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.

Taken from https://www.trainingjournal.com/articles/feature/route-success

References Harmer, J. (2007). “Teaching Listening�. How to teach English Essex: Pearson.