Esercitare il “Listening”…questo sconosciuto!
“I really don’t have an ear for languages!”
I am quite sure that everyone trying to pick up a new language has heard others say or as said this phrase himself. I must say that it makes me smile a bit because I am almost certain there is no such “ear”.
It is obviously a fact that for some people it is undeniably easier to remember and to reproduce sound and so to seemingly have an easier time with the language learning process. Does this have anything to do with this infamous ear?
What I have noticed is that those students that have better refined listening skills, that are concentrated during the lesson on what is being said by everyone and that tend to be very focused on activities that involve Ears, both of them, find learning less difficult.
Listening is a skill which is fundamental in communication, not only in conversations in second languages but also in conversations in one’s native language. Many factors influence our listening capacities, may they be due to the situation, to the speaker and/or obviously to the listener. For example, what percentage of your hearing capacities do you use when you are speaking to an attractive person you might be romantically interested in? Maybe, between 80 to 90%. What about if it is your mother asking you to put your socks away for the fifth time? Maybe, 2%, maybe if that.
In the classroom, motivation is an important factor, but the problem is that we are no longer trained to listening 100% of what is being said, 100% of the time. So the ESL teacher should try and do a bit of listening training right from the start, there are, in fact, quite a few activities that can be applied to get your students hearing mechanism running smoothly again.
It could be a good idea to give an easy pre-task question to help your student get the confidence he will need to make it to the end of the listening activity, and this can also help stimulate his listening for specific information skill.
Breaking all the listening skills down and working on one at a time could also be efficient in reaching the necessary result. Very important is that your student learns to listen for gist right from the beginning. Meaning that his priority is to catch the overall meaning of what is being said without worrying too much about not having understood more than 20% of all the vocabulary.
Listening for detail is also important but can be left for last as it is necessary to listen over and over again before being able to pick up a new word that has just been introduced in a student’s vocabulary.
There is much more to be said but for now let’s leave it because everyone knows that if you keep going on and on about a topic, at a certain point people just stop listening, even if they were just listening to 10% of what you were saying.
Written by Rita Iemma