innovative+ELT+technique++by+FATİH+GÜN

Communicative approach is dominated in language teaching by a communicative approach to language learning. This idea have raised the importance of communicative competence and grammatical competence. While learning a new language listening is as important as speaking and there should be some theories in listening to help students during this process. **Listening within the framework of communicative competence: ** Nation and Newton (2009), state that Listening and Reading are the sources of ‘meaning focused input’. Learner’s main focus and interest should be on understanding, and gaining knowledge or enjoyment or both form what they listen and read. Discourse competence implies an understanding of how language operates at a level above the sentence. It involves knowledge of discourse features such as markers, coherence and cohesion as well as formal schemata in relation to the particular purpose and situational context of the spoken text. Thus if listeners have to recognize and interpret what is heard in longer or interactive discourse, they need first to understand which discourse features have been used and why, and then relate them to the communicative goal and particular context of that piece of discourse. **Marrying Top and Bottom processing in listening: ** Comprehension is viewed as a process of decoding and it begins with the received data that is analysed at successive levels of organization- sounds, words, clauses, sentences, texts- until meaning is derived. The listener’s lexical and grammatical competence in a language provides the basis for bottom-up processing. Teaching bottom-up processing develops the learner’s ability to  Retain input while it is being processed; Recognize word and clause divisions; Recognize key words; Recognize key transitions in a discourse; Recognize grammatical relationships between key elements; Use stress and intonation to identify word and sentence functions. The classroom activities to develop top-down listening skills are as follows: Students generate a set of questions they expect to hear about a topic, and then listen to see if they are answered; Students generate a list of things they already know about a topic and things they would like to learn more about, then listen and compare; Students read one speaker’s part in a conversation, predict the other speaker’s part, then listen and compare; Students listen to part of a story, complete the story ending, then listen and compare endings; Students read news headlines, guess what happened, then listen to the full news items and compare. **Teaching Strategic Listening ** A focus on how to listen raises the issues of listening strategies. Strategies can be thought of as the ways in which a learner approaches and manages a task and listeners can be taught effective ways of approaching and managing their listening: involving listeners actively in the process of listening. **Teaching Listening as Acquisition ** A language program should also provides scope for perceiving listening as facilitating second language acquisition. An analytic approach to listening needs to be adopted which helps breaking listening into sub-skills. This approach offers the possibilities of adopting a diagnostic view to the lesson and to giving practice in ‘micro- listening’. For the sake of methodological clarity, a skills approach to listening needs to separate out three target areas: 1) Types of listening (for gist, for information, etc.); 2) Discourse features (reference, markers, etc.); and 3) techniques (predicting, anticipating, recognizing intonational cues, etc.) (See Appendix B for a list of listening sub-skills).  Listening texts need to be exploited first as the basis for comprehension and second as the basis for acquisition. While Listening serves primarily as a transactional function in the former approach, the latter gives scope for Listening which includes a focus on acquisition.   Johnson (2008) provides a two- part cycle of teaching activities, which are classroom strategies appropriate for the listening- as – acquisition phase:  1) Noticing activities; 2) Restructuring activities. <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">Noticing activities involve returning to the listening texts that served as the basis for comprehension activities and using them as the basis for language awareness. For example, students can listen to a recording in order to : <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">Identify differences between what they hear and a printed version of the text; Complete a cloze version of the text; Complete sentences stems taken form the text; Check off entries form a list of expressions that occurred in the text. <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">Restructuring activities are oral or written tasks that involve productive use of selected items from the listening text. Such activities could include: **<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">Teaching Listening in Integration with Speaking ** <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">Linking listening tasks to speaking tasks as described in the listening as acquisition phase provides opportunities for students to notice how language is used in different communicative contexts. They can then practice using some of the language that occurred in the listening texts. <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">To sum up, teaching listening should include: Firstly, looking at the processing of listening text from both top and bottom which reflects real life listening. Secondly, instruction in listening should include strategy training involving learners actively in the process of listening. Thirdly, a process and an acquisition perspective should be adopted in Listening instruction- helping students to incorporate new linguistic items into their language repertoire to use them in oral production which finally leads to integration of listening with speaking and other language skills. **<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">References: ** <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">Buck, G. 2001. Assessing Listening. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">Field, John. 2008. Listening in the Language Classroom. Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress. <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">Field, John. 1998. “Skills and strategies: towards a new methodology for listening.” ELT Journal 52/2. <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">Nation, I.S.P, and Newton, Jonathan. 2009. Teaching ESL/EFL Listening and Speaking. New York and London: Routledge. <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">Richards, Jack C. 2008. Teaching Listening and Speaking: From Theory to Practice. New York: Cambridge University Press. <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">Uso- Jaun, Esther., Martinez-Flor, Alicia. 2006. (ed) Current Trends in the Development and Teaching of the Four Language Skills. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">Vandergrift, L. 1999. “Facilitating Second language listening comprehension: acquiring successful strategies.” ELT Journal 53/3.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 16pt;">COMMUNICATIVE APPROACH TO TEACHING LISTENING by FATİH GÜN **