Article+reflection+by+Fatih+Kızılkaya

In the article “ ‘Teacher, the tape is too fast!’ Extensive listening in ELT ” the authors compare teaching listening techniques and teaching extensive listening to students to improve their listening. The article starts with the complain of a student who is not able to catch up with the listening on the tape in a listening class. It says that the hardest skill of learning language for students is learning to listen or in other words developing listening skills. Authors say that as students have no interaction to the speaker and don’t have a chance to get clues from nonverbal language, they also have the problem of not being able to catch words, miss the important parts of the speech and an obligance to do the exercises prepared by their teachers. They recommended that teachers should do something rather than waiting their low level proficient students to improve their listening skills by themselves. The authors mention the difficult features of speech that the students come across in listening which are fastness of the speech, variability of the speech, blurriness of the word boundaries, and the speech processed in real time. Also the top listening problems of the students which are speaking rate, distraction, being unable to recognize words they know, new vocabulary, missing subsequent input, nervousness, complexity of sentence, background knowledge, anxiety and frustration and unfamiliar pronunciation are mentioned. Authors say that not much importance is given to the kinds of perception problems that the EFL learners come across. And this is done bacause it is thought that perception is a low level problem that the students can deal with on their own and teaching students higher level cognitive and metacognitive strategies will solve students’ listening problems. And they say that the researches done for teaching effective strategies to low level students are used as a solution to perception problems of the students. However, authors state that teaching strategies is not a practical and a good method to improve the students’ perception of listening. They say that since the teachers may not be aware of all the strategies or know very little about the strategies and it is very hard to know which strategy is the best for every individual in the class, and also teaching strategies are boring for the students and it takes up much time, it is not very helpful to teach the strategies. Instead they recommend something which is teaching extensive listening to students to improve the perception of the students. They mention a successful experiment which is done to middle school students in China to teach extensive listening to students, and give the results and excerpts from the students. They say that it can be done with different varieties of listening activities which are far more enjoyable to students. They also give some resources appropriate and inexpensive to students. In my opinion, what the authors mention is quite a good idea. Since I am a student and I also had such kind of problems. There is no way that without any help a student can solve his or her perception problems. As it should be solved, it should be solved in a way that is most helping for the student, easy for teacher to solve, not much time consuming and rather in a an enjoyable way for the both. There are up to now 2 solutions one of which is teaching the strategies to students and teaching extensive listening to students. If we look at the first solution from the perspective of a student, I can say from my perspective when I was a young student in high school, It would be very hard for me to understand all strategies and choose a specific strategy from a variety of strategies and apply it to myself. As we are able to get only what we are given we never made choices. If I was to choose the strategy that fits me best and works, I would have to try all the strategies ( well, I would not) and it would be time consuming. And as I do trial and error, if I don’t get to the right strategy in my first trials, I would get demotivated and lose all my interest in listening even I would hate listening. Secondly I don’t think any of the students would like learning strategies, personally they would all look very boring to me as it will to the teenagers or youngsters. If we look at teaching strategies from a perspective of a teacher or from my perspective as a future language teacher, it would be very hard for me as well. I would have to learn all the strategies perfectly because you never know which one will specifically work for everyone, also I would have to learn all of them in detail. The other problem is that it would be very unpractical in Turkey where the class size is not less than 25. It would require so much time for me to analyze all the learners in my class and see which of the strategies I taught fits for every individual in my class and give feedback to them. Also it is impossible in terms of arranging time for that in class in Turkey and also do all of the other things I have to do in the class time. It would be really problematic. If we look at the second solution, from the perspective of a student, every student would like to something that is enjoyable and comprehensible. As a student I would love to dedicate 5-10 minutes of each lesson for an enjoyable extensive listening which I would like and understand. For a teacher it would also be good to teach extensive listening in each class. It is something not hard to prepare, something that would develop the skills of every individual, and also enjoyable for everyone in the class. In conclusion, I definitely agree with the writer. And I think it is very helpful for the students with low level proficiency.

REFERENCE


 * Willy A. R., & Thomas S. C. F. (2010).** **‘//Teacher, the tape is too fast!’ Extensive listening in ELT//. **
 * ELT Journal, 65, 52-59, ** **doi:** **10.1093/elt/ccq015**