L. The importance of teaching listening.

Listening is the language modality that is used most frequently. It has been estimated that adults spend almost half of their communication time listening, and students may receive as much as 90% of their in-school information through listening.

Listening is the ability to identify and understand what others are saying. This involves understanding a speaker's accent or pronunciation, his grammar and his vocabulary, and grasping his meaning. There are two main roles for listening in language teaching. The first role: it is important for students to develop the listening skill in order to understand spoken English, whether on TV, radio or in speaking to people. The second role: listening can provide further sources of input and can help the students remember the words, phrases, grammar that they are learning. By working on listening tasks, students can become closely involved with the language and, in doing so, develop their general language proficiency.

By "learning to listen» students attend to what they hear, process it, understand it, interpret it, evaluate it, respond to it. We want them to become involved and active listeners.

According to Kathleen, Galvin there are five main reasons for listening: to engage in social rituals; to exchange information; to exert control; to share feelings; to enjoy yourself.

Whilst hearing can be thought of as a passive condition, listening is always an active process. Comprehension can only occur when the listener can place what he hears in a context. Native speakers, when listening, can call upon their accumulated knowledge of the culture and background of the speaker and the situation and will know from previous experience more or less what to expect. They know that different types of people (young / old, male / female, shy / outspoken) are likely to say different things and speak in different way. They expect certain kinds of language to occur in particular situations They know the kinds of language, which will probably be used in relation to certain topics (football, music, cars, etc). They are aware that the way people speak to each other is influenced by the relationship between them (parents to child and vice versa, boss to subordinate and vice versa, shop assistant to customer and vice versa). A listener can frequently predict what the completion of an individual utterance might be after hearing only part of it. Indeed, it sometimes happens that a listener "takes over", as it were, a speaker's utterance and completes it even before the speaker has managed to get the words out.

This suggests that the act of comprehension requires listeners to place the words in context at the same time as they process the sounds.

There are 3main groups of resources for teaching listening comprehension.

1) your English teacher

2) other speakers of English (classmates, PCV-s, other native speakers)

3) Materials:

· Radio and television programs

· Public address announcements (airports, train/bus stations, stores)

· Speeches and lectures

· Telephone customer service recordings

· English - speaking radio stations

· English - speaking satellite TV channels

· English language films, songs (e.g. on record, audio or video tape)

Listening materials should be carefully graded so as to introduce a bare minimum of unfamiliar words. Listening passages should use normal speed from the start as slowed down speech is distorted and leads to learners relying on auditory cues that will not be present in normal speech. The speech should also include the usual redundancies of informal speech, including pauses, repetitions, saying the same thing in two different ways. Authentic materials and situations prepare students for the types of listening they will need to do when using the language outside the classroom.