Dear FLE 324 members,
You need to comment on the applicability and the effectiveness of the extensive listening approach together with an extensive reading approach to improve the lower-proficiency EFL learners' listening comprehension skills in the Turkish context. Please also comment on the effectiveness of the strategy training approach to improve the EFL learners' listening proficiency, the potential challenges of the extensive listening approach, along with the reading approach suggested in the article, for the EFL learners and teachers in the Turkish context.
YOU NEED TO COMMENT ON ONLY ONE OF THE OPTIONS (OPTION 1) OR (OPTION 2)
In the article, Renandya and Farrell talks about the difficulties of listening for students, especially at the beginner level. These difficulties are fast speech, variability of words in spoken language, blurriness of words when bound together, and the fact that spoken text cannot be paused unlike reading text. These difficulties are faced by Turkish learners of English as much as others. Also, Renandya and Farrell came up with some strategies to deal with these perception problems. Some researchers stated that teachers can make use of strategy training activities and these activities should include presentation-practice-evaluation cycle. And for the strategy training to work it should be implemented systematically and intensively. The teachers should know some aspects of strategy training, how to order these strategies, how to integrate them into curriculum and how much time they should assign for the activities. So there is a heavy burden on teachers who plan to carry out strategy training. In Turkey, most teachers prefer to stick to the curriculum and since the implementation of strategy training requires many skills and effort, I do not think that it can be taught effectively in Turkish context. In Turkey, mostly the levels of the students in a class differ, this is another reason which makes strategy training difficult for teachers. Also, strategy training is a time consuming activity and this may be another disadvantage of applying it in Turkish classes of English learners.
ReplyDeleteAs for the extensive listening, the article considers it just like extensive reading and the researchers believe in its effectiveness. They also state that an interactive reading aloud activity can be useful, too. They talk about the teacher reading aloud comprehensible and interesting stories to the beginner level students and this is proven a very effective activity in an experiment. In Turkish context, it also can be effective for students to develop their listening skills, but there are some conditions to be fulfilled. First of all teacher should be skilled enough to identify which kind of text the students may like, what the level of the text should be and how to read it slow and clear enough for them to understand. Also the teacher should have good pronunciation skills so that the students do not get confused when they encounter the words in a different listening context.
Duygu Can
1548403
In their article, Renandya and Farrell (2011) state some difficulties that the students have, strategy training for students to have success in listening, and some other ideas about extensive listening which is proposed after the success of extensive reading approach. I remember that I also had many problems about listening activities. Renandya and Farrell (2011) state some problems which I totally agree. Firstly, in listening activities, students generally listen to a recording or a song. Most of the time the pace of this activities are much faster than the level of the students. The lack of communicational hints like gists, gestures makes this problem bigger. I think that listening activities doesnt serve its purpose without these communicational hints. In a real listening situation, there becomes a speaker and a listener and they observe each other’s body language as much as speech. Another problem with the listening tasks is “no going back” once the students miss a point in the task, they get distracted and they cannot focus on the rest of the activity. But in a real conversation if you dont understand a part you can ask it again. These problems also prevents listening strategies from working for students’ benefits. I think extensive listening idea can be succesful if the necessary materials are provided for learners. Like extensive reading in which students read what they enjoy reading and by this way they learn reading by reading, extensive listening may help students since the students choose what they want to listen. For example, they can choose the pace of the listening according to their individual progress. Teacher may find some listenings of which the students are familiar with turkish versions such as Nasreddin hodja jokes. However, to implement extensive listening in schools in Turkey, teachers and schools should be able to afford financially for providing necessary materials. Students may not have MP3 players and some listening materials should be bought to apply this approach. On the other hand, they may find some listening materials as the writers of the article suggest, but the quality of these materials can be a problem.All in all, Renandya and Farrell (2011) point out some crucial problems about teaching listening and they mentions another way of teaching listening to learners. I think that in the near future this approach will be much more prevalent.
ReplyDeleteListening is the skill that should be taught in a considerable way in language teaching process. This article shows us that teaching listening to young learners is not an easy task, and this has a burden on teachers, so extensive reading approach should be adopted to lessons for listening teaching. Also, especially young learners have difficulty in understanding what they are listening, and they say to their teacher " teacher the tape is so fast, and I cannot catch the words." Many EFL learners have difficulty in undertsanding listening texts. They have difficulty because they not only cannot catch the words, but also they miss the discourse, gist and spoken details of speech.What is more the level of speech rate above which comprehension becomes impossible is normally much lower than for the more advanced learners. In addition, the words are fully articulated, but most of the time, they
ReplyDeleteundergo radical phonological changes, and students have difficulty in understanding listening parts. To solve this problem, we should teach students higher level cognitive and metacognitive strategies
(such as inferencing) and self-monitoring strategies, raise students’ awareness, and help them brainstorm the strategies, have them practice the strategies, guide them in selecting the strategies that address their particular needs, and evaluate their progress and strategy use.As a conclusion, our job as teachers of foreign language listening is to help our students develop procedural knowledge.
In the article of Renandya and Farrell, the writes mainly point out the problems which students with low level of English face frequently while they are practicing their listening skills. They firstly list the possible problems that students have been through while listening. They also gave a reference from a research in order to support their claim and according to that study; the difficulties faced by the students are caused by the speech rate, differences among speeches, disappearance of some bounding words and lastly uncontrollable and ongoing nature of speech. I think these are really the main sources of the problems that could be occurred during a listening activity and it does not change all over the world. I, as a Turkish learner of English, also remember that I experienced a lot of difficulty when my teacher first had us listen to an audio file in which two British were talking with each other many years ago. Because I couldn’t go back to the moment that I missed, I wasn’t able to understand the rest and the meaning. Actually, I was able to hear only the first words of the sentences, that’s it. I also couldn’t understand many things because of the accent (I was not familiar with heavy British accent at that time) and speech was too fast for me to catch. Therefore, teachers and scholars came up with the idea of “strategic training” which means to teach students some strategies in order to increase their listening competence. However; the article argues that strategic training is not used much or cannot be used by the teachers. The writers also say that students find it useless. I agree with that. Even I, as a prospective teacher, was not trained to teach these strategies to students in a detailed way and I don’t think that my students will understand listening activities perfectly if I teach them some strategies. In Turkey, many English teachers lack of training for strategic training, so how can somebody expect a teacher who doesn’t know the strategic training to train students? Plus, it takes time and here in Turkey, curriculums are designed partly in accordance with the national exams that students have to take. Hence, the writers come up with the solution of “extensive listening”. They took the idea from extensive reading in which students read something which they could understand and enjoy. To me, extensive reading really works for the students. It increases their reading competence as well as it helps students develop reading habit. How about extensive listening? The writers say that teachers could read the stories and texts aloud and it can be a good opportunity for students to practice their listening. Teacher set his/her pace according to the students’ level and uses some gist, gestures and mimics in order to make everything understandable. This way, students develop themselves day by day because the sources of the problems would be eliminated with extensive listening technique. Students get meaningful input and it becomes a pleasure for them to do listening activities. CONTINUING>>
ReplyDeleteThis is all good. I also like extensive listening idea as I like extensive reading technique, too. However; there are some conditions that MONE or at least teachers need to meet in order to be successful. First, not all of teachers of English have a good command of spoken English; therefore they could give false input to students while reading the text aloud. Another concern is that listening skill doesn’t take much attention by the teacher because students don’t have to study that skill for the exam that they will undergo. This perception should be broken and teachers (not only in private but also in state schools) try to design some –meaningful- listening activities for students. However; it takes time. To change the curriculum and allocate many hours for listening by doing extensive listening activities crease some problems as well. Thus, my suggestion is that teachers could make use of extensive listening more than teaching strategies to students and teacher should allocate some part for the listening activity because it is one of the demanding skills of the language and it develops by practice.
ReplyDeleteIn the article of Renandya and Farrell, the writes mainly point out the problems which students with low level of English face frequently while they are practicing their listening skills. They firstly list the possible problems that students have been through while listening. They also gave a reference from a research in order to support their claim and according to that study; the difficulties faced by the students are caused by the speech rate, differences among speeches, disappearance of some bounding words and lastly uncontrollable and ongoing nature of speech. I think these are really the main sources of the problems that could be occurred during a listening activity and it does not change all over the world.
ReplyDeleteListening is the skill that should be taught in a considerable way in language teaching process. This article shows us that teaching listening to young learners is not an easy task, and this has a burden on teachers, so extensive reading approach should be adopted to lessons for listening teaching.
In their article, Renandya and Farrell (2011) talk about the difficulties of listening and they give some strategies to deal with listening. There can be such difficulties as talking fast, misunderstanding of the words, the different types of words and the students cannot stop the conversation whenever they want. In fact when we look these problems, they are the most common ones and make the listening as the most difficult skill. In order to exterminate these problems, the article suggests a variety of strategies such as using gestures, pictures or repetition of the talk etc. These strategies make the listening much easier for the students, so that their motivation and interest for the listening can increase. Both intensive and extensive listening activities are very useful in acquiring the language. Since the students see the real, authentic use of language from the conversations , it is a good opportunity to practice a lot the listening skills. However, since the students have misconceptions about the listening, as a result have difficulties in listening, they tend to be away from that skill. I think, from the beginning of the language learning listening should be provided to the students so that they can improve their language with being in the real environment. Thus, the effectiveness of the listening can be very high for the students especially in the beginner level. In order to increase the application of the listening activities, the teachers should use some strategies to make the listening easy and enjoyable for the students. For example, in the beginner level the teacher should give simple songs to class or at later levels s/he should provide stories for the students. If the students have difficulties in understanding the listening, the teacher should use visuals, gestures and repetitions. In that way, students both get used to the listening from an early age and also have an interest in listening. In my opinion, the extensive listening can increase once the intensive listening is provided to the students effectively. If the students love listening something, they start to do it themselves. Thus, the teachers should be careful about using listening in class environment to improve the students’ listening interest outside too.
ReplyDeleteI think extensive listening is very beneficial for lower profiency learners. They can improve their listening skills by choosing listenings according to their interests and levels. It is not possible for a teacher to find a listening which meets all the students’ needs, interests and levels in a classroom. So it is more effective when the students do extensive listening. When they listen and read the same thing at the same time, it helps them to hear the pronunciation of words and the intonation. Also they will be able to understand the words that they encounter while they are doing extensive reading when they hear them in a different context at a different time because they will be familiar with the pronunciation and the meaning of the words. In my opinion strategy training approach can be effective if the teacher helps the students to find the most appropriate strategy for themselves. There can be several strategies; however, all of the students can’t use the same strategy since they have different learning styles, interesrts and cognitive developments. The possible challenges of the extensive listening approach, along with the reading approach may be the cost. Buying both the reading material and the realted listening material can be expensive but there are online sites which have the reading and listening material. These sites can be used for extensive listening and reading.
ReplyDeleteIn Turkey, importance isn’t given to teaching listening. Our teachers, make a few activities in a very limited time and then expect the students the understand English very clearly. The activities that they want students to do are generally hard. While trying to them, important part of the text is missed. If they could see what the problem is, they would be more helpful for the students. However, the same approaches continue in our country. As mentioned in the article, not only the students listen to the something, they should also interact with a speaker of English. Students cannot develop their listening skills by themselves; the teachers should understand the reason behind that at first and then help their students to develop the expected skill. In their article, Renandya and Farrell presented the features of speech in order to explain why the beginning learners of English have difficulty in listening to a text. Speech is fast, speech is variable, word boundaries are blurry and there is no option to make the speaker say what we have missed while listening to a tape-recorded speech. All of these create a big difficulty for most of the EFL students, in fact. For example, speaking rate comes in the first place among the top ten listening problems. When we look at reading, we see that students can enjoy reading by doing reading. That is to say, they learn reading through reading. This is done through extensive reading; they read anything which they find enjoyable. They develop their word recognition skills, vocabulary, reading comprehension, fluency and general language proficiency. As extensive listening provide such advantages for the students, extensive listening can also prepare an area where students learn listening through listening. This is an effective way to improve listening skill. However, in our country, some of the students may not have access to the materials for extensive listening. In addition to that, most of the schools do not have the financial resources to provide necessary materials. However, there are some activities that can help students to improve their listening skills. Repeated listening, teacher reading aloud, dictations... these can be used in classrooms. In the article, there is also a part related to strategy-based listening approach. As stated in the article, I also agree that it is difficult to implement and the strategy training will probably be difficult for the teachers in our country. The training won’t be the same for most of the teachers and it will take a lot of time. This approach doesn’t give importance to practice; it emphasizes the knowledge of strategy training. Therefore, extensive listening is better than strategy training approach. It is more easy and useful to implement.
ReplyDeleteAccording to Renandya and Farrell (2011), there is a number of challenges that prevent the learners from developing their listening skills. Firstly, for lower proficiency levels, it is really hard for the students to understand a person who speaks the target language fluently since the first obstacle of that is the words seems all attached together and there are no boundaries between them. As Renandya and Farrell refers in there article to the difficulties that students encounter while listening task, one other point is the speed of the speaker and the variety of accents. It is not necessarily the British or American or Canadian accent, but the accent of the person him/herself. It seems really hard to follow a tape rather than following a reading text. Some of the strategies are used in METU prep school to develop the students listening skills by continuous practice. Since listening is one of the most important receptive skills which a learner should use to produce in speaking, a great deal of attention is paid to that. Listening can be integrated in more fun activities such as watching movies or TV series in the class or encouraging the students to do that in their own. Exposure to native speakers by listening is the most effective way in producing fluent and accurate speakers of any foreign language.
ReplyDeleteIn the article according to Renandya and Farrell there are some difficulties of listening, especially for the beginner level stundents. These difficulties are spoken text, fast speech, some unknown words and blurriness of words when bound together.These difficulties are serious problem for the Turkish learners. Renandya and Farrell came up with some strategies to deal with these perception problems. Some researchers stated that teachers can make use of strategy training activities and these activities should include presentation-practice-evaluation cycle. And the main point that they emphasize for the strategy training to work is it should be implemented systematically and intensively. Teachers’ also have some responsibilities.Because,they should know some aspects of strategy trainings also how to integrate them into curriculum. So as we see from all these if a teacher plans to carry out any stragy training she/he should be take into consideration these burdens. Actually there is another problem in Turkish education since mostly tearhers apply the curriculum and that is, stick to it but considering the level of the stundents they differ so it also shows the difficulty of traning system. Moreover, applying traning strategy takes a long time and it show negative aspect of applying traning strategy.Considering extensive listening, Renandya and Farrell emphasize that this is extensive reading and they state that it is effective. They also believe that reading aloud can be beneficial for the students because of activities and experiments.If it is considered for the Turkish curricilum and if a teacher skilled enough it can be useful and effective. One of most important aspect is teacher’s pronunciation.If teacher’s pronunciation is not clear stundents can easily get confused when they hear unknown or difficult words.
ReplyDeleteAccording to Renandya and Farrell article, most of the students find “listening” difficult. When the students do listening activities, they tell teacher that they don’t understand the speech because they couldn’t follow it. They complain that they speak in a fast way. This is the common complaint among the students. In the article, some difficulties that the students face with while doing listening activities are discussed. Renandya and Farrell suggest that students should interact with speakers while doing listening activities, not just listen and complete the tasks that the teacher gives them. They examine why the students find listening difficult. One of these problems is that students find the speech rate fast. Even if speaker speaks in a slow way the students can say that it is fast and they don’t understand. This shows that they are not advanced in English, their level may be beginner or elementary. In other words, there is a link between student’s proficiency level and their understanding of the listening activities. Another problem that students indicate is that speakers sometimes modify the words. For example, they say “Sup?” instead of “What is up?” and the students find it difficult to understand and identify the words. Similarly, because of the fact that word boundaries may be sometimes blurry, students have some troubles. In addition to these, if students miss a word, they have no chance to go back and understand it. This causes a problem for students, too. The speech takes place in a real time. As a result of those problems, students state that they couldn’t comprehend the speeches. Renandya and Farrell conducted some research in order to find some solution for these problems. The major strategy of them is presentation-practice-evaluation cycle. However, these strategies can be effective if they are applied intensively and systematically. As a consequence of this, teachers have an important role to implement these strategies. Apart from these strategies, extensive listening is more beneficial for students to improve their listening skills according to several researches. The activities under the name of “extensive listening” can be dictation, teacher read-alouds, narrow listening, repeated listening, listening while reading. In conclusion, when teachers provide students more sources with listening practices and more comprehensible input, they can improve their listening skills in English.
ReplyDeleteAs Renandya and Farrell states, listening is very difficult for the EFL learners. As the listeners don’t read, or speak with somebody, they don’t have a chance to go back and reread or ask the person to repeat what s/he has said. Listening problems may occur when the speech is too fast. I think this is the main problem. Secondly, native speakers of English sometimes modify, drop or add sounds when speaking. Besides, they sometimes blend the words with the surrounding ones. Thus, the learners cannot recognize those words and can easily be distracted.
ReplyDeleteTo overcome these problems, some researchers have suggested “strategy training approach”. However, the article states, there is no correspondence between these strategies and increase in listening comprehension. It also points out that, some strategies which are proper for some students, may not be effective for the others. I strongly agree with this idea. Besides, it can take so much time to learn these strategies as McDonough and Littlejohn suggests. I think some strategies could be taught, but they shouldn’t be overemphasized. Ridgway says that students should do real listening activities so as to develop skills and automaticity. I think this can be accomplished through extensive listening like dictation and reading aloud activities which are appropriate for student level, as the article suggests.
We can see that extensive learning is more useful to understand the words than applying the strategy-based approach when we look at the research related to listening activity. In this research, one student states that, the strategies don’t help him to recognize the words. However, another student states that, thanks to extensive listening program, he is better able to catch the words.
I strongly support the extensive reading approach along with the intensive listening. To me, apart from those activities above, teachers can promote students to listen songs, watch movies or TV series in English. I think those will be also useful for them to be familiar with the words and catch them easily. It will be much easier for students to listen them as they are enjoyable ones. Those strategies can be used in Turkish context also, but teacher should be careful about the materials’ convenience for the student level. Secondly, if the teacher will do read-aloud activity; his/her pronunciation has to be good and her voice should be clear.
In the article according to Renandya and Farrell there are some difficulties of listening, especially for the beginner level stundents. These difficulties are spoken text, fast speech, some unknown words and blurriness of words when bound together.These difficulties are serious problem for the Turkish learners. Renandya and Farrell came up with some strategies to deal with these perception problems. Some researchers stated that teachers can make use of strategy training activities and these activities should include presentation-practice-evaluation cycle. And the main point that they emphasize for the strategy training to work is it should be implemented systematically and intensively. Teachers’ also have some responsibilities.Because,they should know some aspects of strategy trainings also how to integrate them into curriculum. So as we see from all these if a teacher plans to carry out any stragy training she/he should be take into consideration these burdens. Actually there is another problem in Turkish education since mostly tearhers apply the curriculum and that is, stick to it but considering the level of the stundents they differ so it also shows the difficulty of traning system. Moreover, applying traning strategy takes a long time and it show negative aspect of applying traning strategy.Considering extensive listening, Renandya and Farrell emphasize that this is extensive reading and they state that it is effective. They also believe that reading aloud can be beneficial for the students because of activities and experiments.If it is considered for the Turkish curricilum and if a teacher skilled enough it can be useful and effective. One of most important aspect is teacher’s pronunciation.If teacher’s pronunciation is not clear stundents can easily get confused when they hear unknown or difficult words.
ReplyDeleteEFL students especially those with lower proficiency levels have great difficulty understanding listening input as suggested by Farrell and Mallard since the spoken text cannot be held or touched in the way as a written text. EFL learners have perception problems in listening texts because of speech rate, variables in speech such as phonological changes or articulation differences or the boundary between words may be blurry, thus making the processing of text a burden. In extensive listening approach, it is assumed that listening can be best learnt through listening just like the case in extensive reading. Students receive a lot of comprehensible and enjoyable listening input through teacher directed dictations or self directed listening that can be done outside the school for pleasure. I think, extensive listening together with extensive reading can do a lot in teaching these skills. As long as the reading and listening materials are provided according to the interest and proficiency level of the students, exposure to listening input through reading materials can further develop competency in this skill. When it comes to the issue of strategy training approach, it changes according to the implementation and intensity or how systematically it is applied. We know that learners have different perceptions and thus have different learning strategies. The integration of these listening strategies to curriculum may be a great deal of effort for teachers to handle. I think, strategy training still needs further research to implement in EFL classrooms.
ReplyDeleteRenanda and Farrell mention extensive listening problems, and they also talk about extensive reading. In their writing, they talk about some of the problems which I had also faced while learning English, and it is still same for me while learning other foreign languages. The concise summary of their article states that there is no opportunity for listening the recording again, and while we are listening a song or a recording, we are lack of the body language of the speaker, we don’t see the speaker’s lips or his/her hands, being lack of these possibilities hinders the listening of the learner, and sometimes the speaker speaks with a speed which is above normal or above the capability of the listener. In Turkey’s education, I haven’t benefited much from listening activities in my high school education, we just had listened songs in my prep class in high school, and after that we did no listening activities. However, I had done a lot of reading out of class, and I suppose that my English developed a lot due to my those readings, I used to read forums which are related to technology, and I also had chatted with many people. Therefore, my reading and vocabulary had developed, but I was lack of listening, it was restricted to some English songs. I see extensive reading and listening as a big contributor to learning a language, because the extensive reading and listening is up to the students’ preferences, and if the student reads/listens his own tastes, it would be very easy to learn the language, the students will seek for the language input by himself.
ReplyDeleteIn this article, the main point is the problem in teaching listening. Actually the mentioned points can be seen in real school environments. Most of us have difficulty in listening. First of all, in listening activities;some parts of a real conversation are missing such as gestures. Students just listen and don't see the talking people. This causes to misunderstanding or not understanding. Another point is that in real conversation, you can ask if you cannot understand but it is not possible in listening activities. there should be some problems with one part of the listening and you cannot return again. Some points like these mentioned above should be improved to teach listening in a more effective way.
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