HOW TO IMPROVING LISTENING ABILITY.

THE USE OF AUTHENTIC SOUND MATERIALS FOR BEGINNERS

 ANUSKA NAKICLT

    Anuska NakicIt is generally felt that authentic text materials, and particularly authentic sound materials, are not suited for beginning levels of foreign language study. The reason given is the difficulty of such material. It differs from carefully and slowly pronounced text in tempo, phonetic variability, register etc, and however carefully one searches it is hard to find authentic samples which fit into grammatical and lexical grading of beginning levels. Hence listening practice is usually done on specially composed text material, mainly in order to develop hearing skills, ie identification and aural memory of phonetic groups and sounds, as well as linguistic competence as a whole, with the hope of one day achieving the skill of understanding the content of spoken text at an advanced stage of learning or outside of class. Thus transfer of knowledge from pedagogical to authentic material is excluded from the educational process at the beginning stage of auditory work.

EMPATHETIC LISTENING 

    Good listening in one's mother tongue is not at all easy. Over the past three days of this workshop many of us have lapsed as good listeners. One lecturer on the second day presented such a stimulating thought that I followed the train of ideas it set in motion and became oblivious to the lecture for a patch of about ten minutes. During the same lecture my neighbour ceased to listen for several minutes as he prepared his own presentation that was to follow.The above examples show gross mis-listening but there are other much subtler varieties. A colleague told me at lunch yesterday that she had listened to one of the presentations partly critically and partly just 'passively noting'. It was clear that she felt that 'critical listening' was creditable but that 'passive' listening was somehow poor and inadequate. She here expressed one of the strange prejudices of our culture, a prejudice that makes us much poorer listeners than we need be. Surely the first thing to do when another speaks is to try to really follow what is being said, yes, passively, faithfully and deeply. It is often quite hard enough to do this adequately, without trying to simultaneously process and evaluate the thoughts being presente.

 

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