One of the main challenges that ESL students face both in language learning in general and in listening skills specifically, is how to improve! Often, not surprisingly, one of the teachers’ frustrating questions is how to help their students overcome their difficulties. In fact, they should both know that if they place their focus on the listening process, they can improve listening skills, and achieve successful comprehension. In this blog post, I’d like to highlight the problems that students deal with in this process, and how we can better assist them as teachers.
The main problems students may face on the path of listening while improving their listening skills are fear and their teachers! Yes, you’ve heard me right! The problems that teachers create for students are choosing topics that students have no idea about, materials that are too advanced for their level, or a lack of proper preparation for the listening activities. Students consciously or subconsciously are afraid of missing words or not answering the teacher’s questions correctly and therefore end up embarrassing themselves. And the sad truth is that they’re often correct as the follow-up activities reveal that they fail to get the task done correctly.
Students have their own fair part in this scenario. When there’s an insufficient amount of shared cultural and linguistic knowledge, listening comprehension becomes too difficult. In fact, it’s not necessary for speakers and listeners to share identical backgrounds, but listeners must have enough knowledge to allow for the re-creation of the speaker’s message. Moreover, sometimes students don’t have enough vocabulary to help with comprehension through inferencing and guessing.
To solve the listening comprehension problem, teachers should be mindful of the importance of the listening process. Here are some tips and tricks to assist our students better.
- From day one, teachers should make input comprehensible through visuals and action. Visuals, especially in the warm-up stage leading to the communicative task of listening, can help students contextualize ideas much better.
- Students should consistently keep improving their vocabulary domain as it is the key to the understanding of most meanings.
- Teachers’ expectations should be consistent and compatible with students’ levels, abilities, and capabilities.
- Guessing should be encouraged in the listening process. The listening process itself should be centred on preview, view, review, and discussion. Students should be encouraged to listen for ideas rather than language.
- Teachers should make sure that they don’t give students unfamiliar topics or any topics that weren’t introduced or discussed earlier in class. It is essential for listening comprehension that the relevant schema is activated for optimum results.
- And lastly, teachers should ensure that the classroom is safe for students and that they don’t “fear” not being able to understand every word or not being able to answer correctly in class.
In short, on this journey of improving listening comprehension, learners can enhance their skills through patience, effort, insight, new strategies, and guided practice.
