5.3.2. Reinforcing practical
activities for activation of listening skills and other
language skills.
This study has unveiled that second year English students need
more support in terms of developing their listening abilities. The majority of
the students asserted that they are unable to get main ideas as well as details
when listening to some television programmes in English. This is an ongoing
process and lecturers should design listening (watching at the same time)
activities that encourage active viewing. In this case, most materials with
appropriate exploitation by the lecturer, can assist the students to improve
their listening performance. Here are some practical hints or clues that can
help in this regard:
· Lecturers should train students to use a top-down approach
to listening (see Section 2.5.2.2.). This means that students should learn how
to make use of their schemata (i.e. background knowledge). This may be previous
knowledge about the topic under discussion. Here, students infer from the
contextual knowledge to arrive at the meaning they are looking for.
· Lecturers should use language materials that reflect what
learners will cope with in real life outside the classroom. News broadcasts for
instance attracted much attention from my informants and constitute a good
source for listening practice. As Kilfoil and Van der Walt (1997:150) argue,
`the news of the day is topical and could serve as an introduction for a
discussion on current events.'
· Learners should be actively involved in structured viewing
activities that are referred to as previewing activities, post viewing
activities and while viewing activities.
It is worth stressing that listening strategies outlined above
are subject to modifications depending on the lecturer's focus in his language
class. It means that lecturers can decide to have more than three viewing
activities provided that this does not prevent them from achieving their
objective. He can have the following format: 1) previewing 2) first viewing
(introducing students to the material) 3) second viewing (students watch but
now they work in groups) 4) post viewing (students may take time to paraphrase
or summarise the material) and 5) Other follow-up activities (students are
given topics to discuss but that are related to the viewing) (Ambrose, 2002:
45)
In the above discussion, emphasis was mainly put on strategies
to enhance listening abilities of students. It is important to recall that
performance in listening can be enhanced when the latter is linked to other
language skills (i.e. integrated-skills approach). On this note, the findings
to this study revealed that for instance, speaking skills can be developed
through viewing television materials (see Section 4.5.2). Thus, lecturers are
required to design activities that involve students expressing their opinions
on issues presented on TV or video. Then, as Lonergan cited in Miro suggests,
students carry out role plays similar to the situations they have seen
(1998:7). Writing skills are not left unnoticed and lecturers have options to
use television materials to teach one particular aspect. Furthermore, I suggest
that lecturers try one model of writing instruction as propounded by Jeremiah
(1987) cited in Kortner (1999:1). Actually, he outlines an instructional model
for using television news and documentaries for writing instruction. The model
is presented as follows:
A step by step examination of a selected TV
program can be undertaken in a single class period, using the following
strategies: (1) as a warm-up mechanism, the teacher introduces the writing
skill (for example, to inform or to persuade); (2) students are allowed time
for questions and comments; (3) the news segment or documentary is shown;(4)
students produce an outline for the news report they will write in response to
the stimulus; and (5) the outlines are assessed for organization.
Using television materials for EFL/ESL purposes is broad and
the scope of this study cannot allow me to exhaust this topic. I can add that
content subjects such as literature courses can also take advantage of
television materials. For example in the study of a novel, learners can view
stories on TV and try to make sense of them. They may be asked simple questions
such as: What is the story about? Who are these characters? What are they
doing? Where is the story set? In brief, learners are trained to associate what
they read with the visual images and sounds. Here, actions talk more than mere
written words.
The next set of recommendations suggests an approach to
EFL/ESL that could fit in with the learning and teaching processes at the NUR.
This is the Communicative approach to Language Teaching (CLT).
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