TEACHING LISTENING COMPREHENSION TO THE STUDENTS OF FOURTH

GRADE AT SANTA ANITA SCHOOL ELEMENTARY SCHOOL.

Sonia Chau

I

THE PROBLEM

Since listening comprehension is probably the weakest point for second-language

students. It is important to develop this skill since it is the most important cause of

frustration or discouragement .

Numerous pupils have difficulties with different aspects of listening comprehension.

Some have troubles with factual or literal comprehension, while others have

troubles with interpretation.

Listening comprehension lessons are all too often a series of listening tests in

which listening is not being taught but tested. Therefore, it is vitaly important to

know procedures and techniques for effective teaching listening comprehension.

OBJECTIVES

O i : To develop the communicative competence by the teaching of listening

comprehension.

O1: To evaluate the degree of listening understanding development in the 4 year

at Sta Anita elementary school.

O2: To develop the students communicative competence at Santa Anita School.

THE PROBLEM

Pi: How could be developed the Communicative Competence?

P1: How could be developed the students communicative competence at Santa

Anita School.

P2: How Could be evaluated the degree of listening understanding development

in the four year at Santa Anita elementary School.

JUSTIFICATION

Listening builds up communicative competence for successful second language

learning.

Although listening is a critical skill in virtually all school settings it is not often taught

explicitly. It is rather left to develop as a pupil ´s general educational training.

The first step in developing listening skill in schools is to recognize its importance

and pervasiveness in a second language learning.At Santa Anita School is

necessary to teach the pupils how to listen effectively since is a vital means of

long----term memory formation. Besides, is the weakest point of most pupils over

there.

II

THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK

WHAT IS COMMUNICATIVE COMPETENCE?

The ability to achieve successful communication in the language i.e. to put a

message across successfully.

HOW WE HEAR SOUND?

By using our auditory system, which consists of the outer ear, the middle ear and

the inner ear.The auditory system is usually described as a series of successive

stages.

The outer ear consists of the pinna (this is the part of the ear we can see) and the

auditory canal.The pinna modifies the incoming sound, in particular the higher

frecuencies, and allows us to locate the source of the sound.

Soud waves travel down the canal and cause the eardrum to vibrate.The vibrations

are passed along through the middle ear, which is a remarkable transformer

consisting of three small bones (The ossicles) surrounding a small opening in the

skull (the oval window).The major function of the middle ear is to ensure efficient

transfer of sounds (which are in the form of air particles) to the fluids in the

cochlea.

In addition to this transformation function, the middle ear also has a protective

function.The ossicles have tiny muscles which can contract (this is called the reflex

action) to reduce the level of sound that will reach the inner ear.

This reflex action occurs when we are presented with loud sounds such as the roar

of an aircraft engine.This protects the delicate hearing mechanism from damage.

Interestingly, the reflex action also occurs when we begin to speak.

In this way the reflex protects us from too much feedback that is, it prevents us

from hearing too much of our own speech and thus becoming distracted by it.

The cochlea is the most important part of the ear in terms of auditory

percepion.The cochlea is a small body structure , about he size of a thumnail,

which is a narrow at one end and wide at the other.It is filleds with fluid.The

membranes inside the cochlea respond mechanically to movements of the fluid

(this is called sinusoidal stimulation).Lower frecuency sounds stimulate primarily

the narrower end of the membrane and higher frecuencies stimulate only the

broader end.Each different sound, however produces varying patterns of

movement in the fluid and membrane.

THE HUMAN AUDITORY SYSTEM

At the side of the cochlea nearest the brain stem are thousands of tiny hair cells,

with ends both inside and outside the cochlea.

The outer hair cells, with ends both inside and outside the cochlea.

The outer hair cells are connected to the auditory nerves fibres which lead to the

auditory cortex of the brain.These hair cells respond to minute movements of the

fluid in the membrane, and convert the mechanical movements of the fluid into

nerve (neural) activity.

These nerves l,ike other nerve systems in the body, have evolved to a high degree

of specialization.This means that different auditory system fibres respond only to

specific frecuencies of sound.

When presented with a sequence of sound waves, these nerves produce a specific

excitation pattern which is passed along to the brain.For instance, if you hear me

say bye, your auditory nerves will be triggered in an identifiable pattern.This is the

measurable aspect of hearing.

Not all aspects of hearing speech, however are measurable.Not everyone hears

the same thing even when the same words are spoken.Sometimes, the activity of

one part of the nerve is suppressed by the presence of a second sound.For

example , if I say good bye, your auditory nerve may still be responding to good

when the word bye reaches it.As a result, the nerve activity may be suppressed

and you may not hear bye clearly.Also these nerves are affected by our general

health and level of arousal or fatigue, and so we hear differently when we are tired

or overstimulated.Another factor that interferes with accurate hearing is that our

auditory nerves sometimes seem to fire ramdomly, even when no hearing stimulus

is present.

HOW WE HEAR SPEECH

When sounds reach our inner ear and excite the auditory nerve, they are passed to

the auditory cortex of the brain.If they are speech sounds, we begin phonological

decoding.

The human auditory system is a series of stages for converting sound to neural

stimuli.hearing occurs when(1) sound vibrations reach the eardrum.(2) causing the

ossicles to vibrate and the stapes to move.(3) The vibrations pass through the oval

window to the fluid-filled canals of the cochlea,(4) and are transmitted to the

cochlear duct where they set off nerve impulses which are sent along the cochlear

nerve to the brain.

IMPORTANT ELEMENTS FOR LISTENING COMPETENCE

RECOGNIZING PHONEMES

It is the step of discriminating between sounds or putting the sounds into

categories.This is called categorical perception.

These phonemes can be classified as consonants and vowels.

ALLOPHONIC VARIATIONS

When we listen to speech, we cannot anticipate hearing clear pronunciation of

words since all phonemes change their features depending on the words or

phrases they are part of .These changes are called allophonic variations.

Another class of allophonic variations are accents the form of speech used in

different speech communities.

Many variations can be described in terms of assimilation, reduction and elision.

SPEECH PERCEPTION

In order to understand listening, it is important to understand how the hearing

mechanism works and what hearing contributes to language

understanding.Hearing is the basis of language perception, and perception is the

basis for listening.When we understand what aural perception does and does not

provide us as we listen, we can understand how hearing is complemented by

thinking and interpretation processeses.

SPEED OF PERCEPTION

One of the most obvious features of human language is that it occurs in

sequences.The various sounds in English can be arranged in various sequences to

form thousands of different words, and the various words in turn can be arranged

in different sequences to form a nearly infinite number of phrases.

In conversational English, the average word (such as sprint or olive or speech) has

about five phones, or distinctive sounds.Since most of us tiypically speak at a rate

of about 150 words per minute, this means that we are producing 12.5 sounds per

second.(These computations for other languages show similar results.)

As experiments have shown, however, the human auditory system cannot

distinguish more than two or three sounds per second.

Therefore, when we listen to language, we must depend on a sampling of sounds

from the stream of speech.Based on this sampling and employing other information

to predict likely sounds, we can still identify all of the sounds of language as

someone speak to us.

When we perceive sound, we rely on length, frecuency and loudness to identify

sounds accurately.These aspects of sound are often redundant in speech-for

example, if we do not hear the frecuency correctly we can often guess it based on

the length or loudness.

MEMORY

Almost a decade ago Rivers (1971) applied the concept of memory to second-

language listening, pointing out that a listener may comprehend short utterances

and yet have trouble remembering that information of extended speech.Why is so?

It is partly due to his failure to distinguish between items of high and low

information value, and to anticipate these.He tends to listen to every word, thus

commiting the first cardinal sin:Disregarding redundancy.The basic problem with

listening to every word is that is hinder the student from keeping up.By the time he

is in the third word, the speaker is on the sixth.And the longer the message, the

further behind the listener gets.

Lado (1965) cites several experiments that support the notion that memory span is

shorter in a second language.

WHAT´S LISTENING COMPREHENSION

˝ The process of understanding speech in a first or second language. The study of

listening comprehension processes in second language learning focuses on the

role of individual linguistic units (e.g. PHONEMES, WORDS, grammatical

structures) as well as the role of the listener's expectations, the situation and

context, background knowledge and the topic. It therefore includes both TOP

DOWN PROCESSING and bottom up processing. While traditional approaches to

language teaching tended to underemphasize the importance of teaching listening

comprehension, more recent approaches emphasize the role of listening in building

up language competence and suggest that more attention should be paid to

teaching listening in the initial stages of second or foreign language learning.

Listening comprehension activities typically address a number of listening

functions, including recognition (focusing on some aspect of the code itself),

orientation (ascertaining essential facts about the text, such as participants, the

situation or context, the general topic, the emotional tone, and the genre),

comprehension of main ideas, and understanding and recall of details ˝. (5:10-12).

WHAT ARE THE CHARACTERISTICS OF LISTENING COMPREHENSION?

Range of comprehension: able to understand all styles of speech in the target

community; able to understand abstract concepts.

Strategies for understanding:able to seek clarification smoothly when speech is

unintelligible: able to note areas where own knowdledge is lacking to achieve an

acceptable level of understanding and to note where speaker is vague or

inconsistent.

Appropiate interaction: able to understand and display appropriate listener

responses in a wide range of social and specialized contexts in the target culture

setting.

Applications: able to attempt and perform acceptably any task requiring

comprehension of oral language.

Top-Down And Bottom-Up Processing

Linguists generally agree that there are two distinct, but complementary processes

involved in processing information when we listen to spoken language: (1) top-

down and (2) bottom-up. Top-down processing refers to using background

knowledge or previous knowledge of the situation, context, and topic to interpret

meaning. In other words, using previous knowledge and experience to anticipate,

predict, and infer meaning. Native speakers obviously have a cultural advantage in

this regard. Bottom-up processing refers to decoding the sounds of a language into

words, clauses, and sentences, and using one ﾕ s knowledge of grammatical or

syntactic rules to interpret the meaning of an utterance.

The problem for foreign learners often lies at the phonetic level of bottom-up

processing. Even if they manage to develop a strong set of predictions, they still

need to monitor the sounds they hear in order to know which predictions are being

confirmed and which are not. The cues and hints at the phonetic level provide the

raw data of language input. Without this data there is no linguistic

THE NATURE OF COMPREHENSION

In order to establish whether learners have understood correctly, it is usual to set

some kind of listening comprehension task.The first question that we should

perhaps ask ourselves is:How do we know when someone has understood

correctly:

We should proceed on the basis of requiring them a reasonable interpretation in

the context (Brown and Yule).Such a consideration suggests that those listening

comprehension exercises which demand exact recall of verbal details are

particularly misguided.This being so, listening tasks for foreign learners should not

rely exclusively, or perhaps even mainly, on multiple-choice items or questions

which require exact recall of verbal detail

CONVERSATIONAL LISTENING MICRO-SKILLS

Jack Richards (1983) provides a taxonomy of 33 skills involved in conversational

listening, 19 of which can be classified as belonging to bottom-up processing.

Given the time constraints teachers and learners face in the classroom, seven of

these 19 bottom-up micro-skills have important pedagogical significance:

1. ability to discriminate among the distinctive sounds of the target language

2. ability to recognize the stress patterns of words

3. ability to recognize the functions of stress and intonation to signal the

information structure of utterances

4. ability to identify words in stressed and unstressed positions

5. ability to recognize reduced forms of words

6. ability to distinguish word boundaries

7. ability to recognize elliptical forms of grammatical units and sentences

All seven of these micro-skills are directly related for foreign learners' weaknesses

in recognizing common reduced forms and deletions.

Listening skills/activities in the classroom : altering and marking

cloze exercises

conflicting versions

constructing models

detecting mistakes (this is not T/F formula)

diagram-aided and -based activities

extensive listening

following directions

following a narrative thread

gap filling

guessing definitions

guessing unknown words

information transfer (charts, maps, grids)

identifying context

identifying specific information in the context

identifying topics

inferring information

intensive listening

listening for specific information

listening for key information

map-based activity (town map, services map)

note taking (noting specific information, noting the whole text)

obeying instruction

ordering

paraphrasing

predictive listening

pronunciation practice

questions (T/F, multiple choice, open ended, on text)

recognising specific words words in context

recognising synonyms and parallel expressions

recognising varieties of English

ticking off items

T/F statements

understanding a description of appearance

understanding a description of location

understanding instructions

TECHNIQUES TO IMPROVE LISTENING COMPREHENSION

1.Providing practice in active processing

What the students need is a practical means of applying the operation of active

processing as he listens to oral material in the foreign language.How can we build

activities into his practice sessions that will aid him in listening with retention? A

basic assumption is that given enough practice in active operations in the

classroom ; the student will improve in processing messages he hears in real

situations.In other words he will learn what he practices. It´s the teacher ´s task to

organize and provide that practice.

2.Dictation of troublesome words

An interesting technique for expanding the students ´s knowdledge of vocabulary

consists of extracting from listening material words that are anticipated to be

troublesome, presenting them through dictation, and them perhaps calling for oral

repetition.

3.Relistening with Spacing

In this section you will hear sections with abnormally long pauses.This should help

you remember the messages inmediately preceding the pauses-messages that

you may have lost before.

4.Homework listening tasks

The following gives examples of some listening tasks which can be done as

homework.

a)transcribing as much as possible from the tape (home dictation

practice).However, students should be warned that they will need to listen to only a

little of the tape, stop, write, rewind (to try to catch what eluded them), listen again

and repeat this procedure several times.

b)creating questions based on the text.This also provides practice in another area

which students seldom have the opportunity to develop.Usually they are busy

answering questions, not creating them.

5.Visual support during listening

Visual support, in the form of pictures, graphs, diagrams, maps, etc., is vitally

important in a listening course based on audio-tapes where learners are deprived

of the visual element normally present in any spoken interaction.Visuals can help

learners by supplying cultural information and by enabling them to predict more

accurately (a picture of the speaker really is worth a thousand words).Visuals can

also provide support during listening by reinforcing the aural message or, as a part

of a listening task, by focusing learners ´attention on the important parts of the

message and training them to listen for specific information.

6. Error analysis and Remedial Action

Whenever learners may experience difficulty in understanding the text.If we want

to teach listening comprehension, then it is imperative that we provide more help

for learners that simple telling their errors and providing the right answers.We need

to consider carefully the nature of the discourse in order to try to ascertain what

difficulties it presents, and what sort of information the learner might need in order

order to understand similar discourse types in the future.

III

METHODOLOGY

TITLE:

The teaching of listening comprehension as a basis for the development of

communicative competence

CONCEPTUAL ABSTRACTION

Teaching listening comprehension is neccesary due to students major areas

relating to the problem:(1)The difficulty of remembering the new messages

contained in extended speech. (2)The rapid-sounding pace of the speech .(3)The

overwhelming number of unfamiliar words heard.The solution for these problems is

to provide practice in active processing by activities that developed listening skills

in the target language coupled of facilitating techniques.

OBJECT

OB: The communicative competence

DEPENDENT VARIABLE

DV: Development of the [ Communicative Competence]

INDEPENDENT VARIABLE

IV: The teaching of listening comprehension

GENERAL HIPOTHESIS

Hi:The more listening comprehension is taught, the better communicative

competence will be developed.

H1:The more practice for active processing of information is given to the students,

the more listening comprehension will be developed.

H2:The more practice for active processing the students of fourth grade in Santa

Anita school gets; the better listening comprehension will become.

.

TYPE

This study is non experimental , correlational and explanatory.

P OPULATION AND SAMPLE

From a universe of 300 students of both sexs at Santa Anita School,.40 English

students of elementary level were selected for this study.

THE SAMPLE

40 students of both sexs that are taking the English course in the fourth grade of

elementary level. whose ages range from 8 to ten years old ,

INSTRUMENTS

An interview based on SOPA.the interview lasts from 15 to 20 minutes.At the end

of the interview the student receive a reward for his participation.The interview are

Audiotaped recorded for subsequent verification of the scores.

The ways by which the level of listening understanding will be evaluated is

by SOPA) (students oral proficiency assessment) .This is a innovative language

instrument developed by the center for applied linguistics in partnership with the

national K-12 foreign language resource center (Iowa State).It is based on an

interview.The interview is conducted primarily in the language that the students are

studying.Assessment procedures takes places in a quiet pace set up for it.Students

are assessed in pairs and during the activities they are encouraged to interact one

with another as well as with the interviewer.The focus of the interview is to

determine what the student can do.

The interviewer winds down the activities by asking a few questions or giving

some commands at their proficiency level.

INTERVIEW

1. Please sit down

2. What is your name?

3.How are you?

4.How old are you?

5. Well, dou you like stories?

3. I will tell you a story about this picture for five minutes.After that you tell me all

that you can remember , .o.k?

4.So how did you feel?

5. What do you remember?

6. Do you like it?

7.Can you retell it ?

8. Who do you think is the evil, the bad in this story?

9.Who is the good, the hero in this story?

CRONOGRAM

2003 YEAR

JUNE Gathering information

AUGUSTElaboration of the project

SEPTEMBER

BUDGET

Books 120 Photocophies 10

Printing 30 Picture Scanning 2 Local transportation 60 Internet 10__________________________________ TOTAL 232

BIBLIOGRAPHY

1Introducing Listening. MICHAEL ROST (1994) . England 1st edition.Penguin English ,.

2.Teaching Listening Comprehension. PENNY UR. (1984)England .Cambridge university press

3.Macmillan Press. A listening lesson.

4. LISTENING COMPREHENSION: teaching or testing .ELT JOURNAL Volume 41/2 April 1987.Oxford

5.Jack Richards works academics books, classroom texts and articles.htm.

6.university press,England 126:130 p.p.

7.www.professorjackrichards.com