Exploiting Listening Texts for Teaching

Her interest is specifically in developing materials for teaching of listening and speaking in English.  She proposes a new approach for the teachers to improve the teaching of English in terms of listening skills.

The article focuses on the significance of exploiting authentic listening texts instead of the existed non-authentic ones into the English classrooms. The need to expose the students to authentic listening texts is important because it will affect students’ ability to understand the native speakers’ accents, intonations, stress, etc. This article can be regarded as another ways for teachers to strengthen their teaching of listening. As for me, it benefits me in many ways because I am going to teach English someday. Therefore, the emphasis on authenticity of materials keeps me aware that my future students need to learn something that they can apply for practice in the real world. I will try my best to maximize the exposure of the recommended authentic listening materials in my English classrooms in future. 

Briefly, Mining Listening Text article states the current problem or issue about listening that needs to be dealt with, overconfidence versus low-confidence level, the over-emphasis on top town processing, listening as a skill, the need to supplement coursebooks with authentic listening text, reasons for the lack of authentic published listening text, the aims of classroom listening practice, preparation for classroom listening practice and other suggested classroom activities. The organizational structure in this article is problem and solution based where the writer firstly state the current situation that needs to be solved and then she came up with the suggestion of supplementing authentic listening material for teaching listening.

First of all, I will describe the terms that might need to be further explained for better understanding. The first term is called ‘scripted listening texts’. Scripted listening texts are the scripted texts that are performed by actors in studio. One example of scripted listening texts includes the listening training exercise tape. The second term is called ‘authentic listening texts’. Authentic listening texts are the genuine, unedited listening texts that are taken from events that happen in real life by the native speakers. The BBC radio broadcast CD is one of the authentic listening texts. The last term is known as ‘Top-down processing skills’. The top-down processing skills refers to the learning where students listen while predicting what they hear using their schematic knowledge and the knowledge of the listening context in order to understand a particular situation.