DISCUSSION
- Micro and Macroskill for teaching listening
Jack richarts(1993), in his seminar article on teaching listening skills, provided a comprehensive taxonomy of aural skills involved in conversational discourse. Such lists are very useful in helping you to breakdown just what it is that your learner need to actually perform as they acquire affective listening strategies. Through a checklist of microskills, you can get a good idea of what your techniques need to cover in the domain of listening comprehention. So microskills are the components in listening comprehention and macroskills are the application in listening comprehention.
Micro and macroskill of listening comprehention that adapted from recharts (1983) :
- Microskill
- Descriminate among the distinctive sounds of english
- Retain chunks of language of different lengths in short term memory
- Recognise english stress patterns, words, in stress and unstressed positions, rhythmic structuture, intonation countours and their role in signaling information
- Recognize reduced form of words
- Distinguish word boundaries recognise a case of words and interpret word order patterns and their significance
- Process speech at different rates of delivery
- Process speech containing pauses, errors, corrections, and other perfomance variables
- Recognize grammatical words classes (nouns, verbs, etc), system (e.g tense, agreement, pluralization) , patterns, roles, and elliptical forms.
- Detect sentence constituents and distinguish between major and minor constituents
- Recognize that a particular meaning may be expressed in different grammatical forms
- Recognize cohesive devices in spoken discourse
- MACRO SKILLS
- Recognize the communicative functions of utterences according to situations, participant, goal
- Infer situations, participants, goals using real-word knowledge
- Form events, ideas and so on, described, predict outcomes infer links and connections between events, deduce causes and effects and detect such relation as main ideas, supporting ideas, new information, given information, generalization, and ex emplification
- Distinguish between literal and implied meanings
- Use facial, kinesic, body language, and other nonverbal clues to decipher meanings
- Develops and use a battery of listening strategies, such as detecting keywords, guessing the meaning of word from context, appealing for help and signaling comprehension or lack there of
- Principles for Teaching Listening
- Expose students to different ways of processing information : Bottom-Up vs Top-Down.
A useful metaphor used to explain reading, but equally applicable to listening is buttom up vs top down processing. Buttom -up prcessing, students start with the component parts : words, grammar, and the like. Top -down processing, learners start from their background knowledge such life experience or called content schema, or textual schema (awareness of the kinds of information used to given situation).
Many students-especially those with years of “school english” have learned via methods that stress the “parts” of english: vocabulary and grammatical structures. Its not surprising, therefore, that these learners try to process english from the buttom up.
- Expose students to different types of listening
There’s an adage in teaching listening that says : it’s not just what they are listening to, it’s what they are listening for. Listeners need to consider the purpose. They also need to experience listening for different reasons. There are three types that important in listening:
- Listening for gist : you listen in order to understand the main idea of the text.
- Listening for specific information : you want to find out specific details, for example key words.
- Listening for detailed understanding: you want to understanding all the information the text provides.
- Teach a variety of tasks.
If learners need experience with different types of listening texts, they also need to work with a variety of tasks. Since learners do the tasks as they listen, it is important that the task itself doesn’t demand too much production of the learner. Tasts that too much production can’t be done in real time and if students get the answer wrong, you don’t know if they really didn’t understand, or if they did understand but didn’t know how to respond, or if they understood at the time but forgot by the time they got to the exercise. Incorporating different tasks also increases the student’s interest.. if listening work in class follows too narrow a pattern, it is easy for the learner and teacher to lose interest.
- Consider text, difficulty, and authenticity.
In addition to the task, the text itself determines how easy or difficult something is to understand. When the learners talk about text difficulty, the first thing many mention is speed indeed, that can be problem. But the solution is usually not to give them unnaturally slow, clear recordings. A more useful technique is to simply put pauses between phrases or sentences.
Brown (1995) describes six factors that increase or decrease the ease of understanding :
- The number of individuals or objects in a text (e.g. more voices increase difficulty)
- How clearly the individuals or objects are distinct from one another (e.g. a recording with a male voice and a female voice is easier than one with two similar male voices or two similar female voices)
- Simple, specific spatial relationships are easier to understand than complex ones (e.g. in a recording giving directions, information like turn right at the bank is easier to understand than go a little way on that street )
- The order of events (e.g. it is easier when the information given follows the order it happened in, as opposed to a story that includes a flashback about events that happened earlier.)
- The number of inferences needed (e.g. fewer are easier than more)
- The information is consistent with what the listener already knows (e.g. hearing someone talk about a film you have seen is easier to understand than hearing the same type of conversation about one you haven’t seen)
Brown and menasche (1993) suggest looking two aspects of authenticity :
- Task authenticity
- Simulated : modeled after a real life ; nonacademic task such as filling in a form
- Minimal/incidental : check understanding, but in a way that isn’t usually done outside of the classroom; numbering pictures to show a sequence of events or identifying the way something is said are example
- Input authenticity
- Genuine : created only for the realm of real life, not for classroom, but used in language teaching.
- Altered : no meaning change, but the original is no longer as it was (glossing, visual resetting, pictures or color adapted)
- Adapted : created for real life (words and grammatical structure changed to simplify the text)
- Simulated : written by the author as if the material is genuine
- Minimal/incidental : created for the classroom; no attempt to make the material seem genuine.
- Teaching listening strategies
Rost (2002) identifies as strategies that are used by successful listeners:
- Predicting : effective listeners think about what they will hear. This fits into the ideas about prelistening mentioned earlier.
- Inferring : it is useful for learners to “listen between the lines
- Monitoring: good listeners notice what they do and don’t understand
- Clarifying : efficient learners ask questions ( what does….mean) and give feedback (I don’t understand yet) to the speaker
- Responding : learners react to what they hear
- Evaluating : they check on how well they have understood
According to harmer, there are some principles for teaching listening :
- Encourage students to listen as often as much as possible
The more students listen, the better they get at listening and the better they get at understanding pronunciation and at using it appropriately themselves. One of our main tasks, therefore, will be to use as much listening as they can (via the internet, podcasts, CDs, tapes)
- Preparation is vital
Teacher and students need to prepared for listening because of a special features we discussed above, teacher need to listen to the tape all the way through before they into the class. Students need to be made ready to listen.
- Once will not be enough
The first listening is often used just to give students an idea of what the listening material sounds like, so that subsequent listening are easier for students. Once students have listened to a tape two oe three times, however, they will probably not want to hear it too many times more.
- Students should be encouraged to respond to the content of a listening, not just to the language
The most important part of listening practice is to draw out the meaning, what is intended, what impression it makes on the students. Questions like ‘do you agree ?’ are just as important as question like ‘ what language did she use to invite him ?’
- Different listening stages demand different listening tasks.
For a first listening, the task needs to be fairly straightforward and general, focus in on detail of information language use, pronunciation, etc
- Good teachers exploit listening texts to the full
If teachers ask the students to invest time and emotional energy in a listening task, and if they themselves have spent time choosing and preparing the listening then it makes sense to use the tape for as many difference application as possible.
- Classroom Listening Actifity
- The pre-listening stage
This is a stage where students do some actifities before they listen to the text. Underwood (1990) states that it is unfair to plunge the students straight into the listening text, even when testing rather than teaching listening comprehention, as this makes it extremely difficult for them to use the natural listening skills of matching what they hear with what they expect to hear and using their previous knowledge to make sense of it.
- The while- listening stage
The while listening stage is a stage where the students are asked to do some activities during the time that the students are listening to the text. The purpose of the while listening activities is to help the learners develop the skills of eliciting messages from the spoken language. Good while- listening activities help learners find their way through the listening text and build upon the expectations raised by the pre-listening activity
- The post listening stage
Post listening activities are activities related to a particular listening text, which are done after the listening is comleted. Some post listening activities are extensions of the work done at the pre-listening and while linstening stages and some relate only loosely to the listening text itself. Post listening activities can be much longer than while listening activities because at this stage the students.
INTRODUCTION
- Background
The term listening is used in language teaching to refer to a complex process that allows us to understand spoken language. Listening has conjunction to other skills as reading, speaking and writing. Listening is the channel in which we process language in real time – employing pacing, units of encoding and pausing that are unique to spoken language.
In teaching listening, there are micro and macro skills that should be exist. Microskills is attending to the smaller bits and chunks of language, in more of a bottom-up process. Besides macroskills is focusing on the larger elements involved in a top-down approach to a listening task.
In this paper will be discussed about micro and macroskills also about the principles of teaching listening and more about what activities in listening comprehension are in the classroom that generally there are three steps: Pre-listening, While-listening, and Post-listening.
- Formulation of Problem
- What are the macro and microskills in teaching listening?
- How are the explanations about the principles of teaching listening?
- What are anykinds of classroom activities of teaching listening which the teachers can do?
- Purposes
- Submitted for fullfilment of TEFL task
- Explain the macro and microskills in teaching listening
- Explain the principles of teaching listening
- Explain anykinds of classroom activities of teaching listening
CONCLUDING
Listening is the channel in which we process language in real time – employing pacing, units of encoding and pausing that are unique to spoken language. As a goal-oriented activity, listening involves ‘bottom-up’ processing (in which listeners attend to data in the incoming speech signals) and ‘top-down’ processing (in which listeners utilize prior knowledge and expectations to create meaning). Both bottom-up and top-down processing are assumed to take place at various levels of cognitive organisation: phonological, grammatical, lexical and propositional.
In the teaching listening, as teachers need to consider about what the teacher should do in the class. As micro and macroskills those need to be payed attention. Those can lead teachers in order the teaching listening processing can run well. Besides, the principle of teaching listening can be used to manage the running of teaching listening in the class. As expose students to different ways of processing information: buttom-up and top-down processing.
Classroom listening activity also lead teacher to conduct good learning processing in the class. The activities in the class make teachers can predict what lessons can be exsisted in the classroom.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Nunan david, Teaching english to speakers of other languages, 2001, Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo
Brown douglas, teaching by principle, 2000, san francisco, California.
Harmer Jeremy, how to teach english, 1998, longman, England.
KEEP STRUGGLE 