The Importance of Teaching Listening Skill to Children
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c To improve the general listening attitude: listen for enjoyment, improve
concentration span, or develop the memory. d
To develop aspects of language: listening to improve pronunciation, stress, rhythm, and intonation, as well as familiarity with new words and structures.
e To reinforce conceptual development: spoken texts can act as useful revision
for reinforcing concepts such as number, size, or cause and effect. f
To interact with others: activities which encourage children to work with others require the learners to negotiate meaning by listening and asking
questions, checking meaning, agreeing, and so on. g
To provide support for literacy: older children can be encouraged to make connection between spoken and written English by picking out written words
or statements which are part of a spoken message. 3
Helping children develop specific strategies for listening. The important listening strategies are; a predicting encouraging listeners to
guess what they think they will be listening, b working out the meaning from the context encouraging listeners to use pictures, their general knowledge, or the
message to work out the meaning of unfamiliar words, c recognizing discourse patterns and markers.
4 Setting a specific listening task.
In order to make listening an active, learning-focused process, teachers need to develop a repertoire of different pre-, while-, and post-activity types which fit
different types of language.
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5 Organizing listening.
Listening materials can be recorded materials and teachers‟ talk. Designing good activities which improve children‟s listening comprehension can be done by
giving visual pictures, books, or sentence strips when children listen. Children are expected to enrich input language with some regular listening
practice in learning English as a foreign language. They will listen to many varieties of oral texts thro
ugh teachers‟ talk, singing chanting, dialogues, instruction giving, and storytelling. Besides, audio tapes and videos are alternative
media in teaching listening skills. Using good qualities audio tapes to accompany teachers while teaching will help teachers who are not confident about their
English proficiency Pinter, 2006: 65. Effective teaching listening to children can be achieved if the teachers
followed the principles of teaching listening which based on children‟s characteristics and development. Here are the principles that suggested by Scott
and Yterberg 1990: 21-22. 1
Giving visual back-up through facial expression, movement, mime, and pictures.
2 Saying things clearly and repeating them.
3 Not overloading children on listening tasks.
4 Checking children‟s understanding during listening process.
5 Designing the appropriate listening activities to create cheerful or nice quite
atmosphere.
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It is worthy to remember that something that has been heard is very easy to be forgotten. Children who have short attention span can easily forget what they
hear and get nothing from their listening class if the teachers have no idea how to teach listening to them. Repetition is really needed in a listening class because it is
impossible to re-listen materials if the teachers do not retell them. Then, pointing out some important things, directing children‟s attention to specific points, and
asking children‟s understanding along the teaching learning process should be done in order to make children learn effectively. Besides, teachers should
remember that listening is not a passive activity and it is important for teachers to involve children in the class activity.
In conclusion, making the children feel confidence to learn listening, stating the reason why the children have to listen, assisting the children to develop
listening strategies, setting up the suitable tasks, and deciding the choice of using recorded or live inputs are the important points that must be considered by
teachers in teaching listening to children. Besides, children should be given a lot of opportunities to practice listening in a fun way so they will not feel that
practicing listening is a burden. Visual support, clear pronunciation input, and repetition are also important in teaching listening to children.