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Listening Why listening? Listening comprehension is an important skill area. First, students of English should be able to understand the spoken language as part of their overall mastery of English. There are a lot of native and nonnative speakers of English out in the wide world, and we learn English partly in order to be able to communicate with them. Second, good listening comprehension skills are the key to progress in speaking: students who can understand a variety of speakers in different contexts can incorporate the language they hear into their own spoken English. Good listeners can incorporate new vocabulary and structures, fine-tune pronunciation, and assimilate appropriate communicative strategies into their own interlanguage on the basis of what they hear. Third, the techniques used to develop listening comprehension (such as note-taking, listening for general meaning or specific details, making predictions and drawing conclusions based on oral texts) are useful for general learning and study skills. Who are the students? We teach listening comprehension only to first and second year students of English. Many students arrive in the English Department with reasonable reading and writing skills, but need practice in the oral language. An outline of our listening classes for students enrolled in one of our English programmes can be accessed from here. From third year on, our focus switches to speaking. Hopefully students will by then have acquired basic skills and can continue to practice and improve through self-study. Regular exposure to the spoken language is essential to making progress, and advice for those who wish to improve their English listening skills can be found here. |