Improving Listening Competence by Dictating Newscast of VOA and BBC

Abstract: This paper presents an approach of improving students’ listening competence by dictating newscast of VOA and BBC in class listening. An explanation of how listeners can integrate their separate skills of listening in dictation is given. It also presents the advantages of the authentic listening materials and the efficiency of the training method in improving listeners’ listening competence.

Key words: Listening Competence; Newscast; Dictate

Introduction

English as an important tool of communication is widely used in every field. As one of the basic language arts, listening plays a major role in oral communication. The process of hearing, identifying, understanding and interpreting spoken languages (Lewis 1958) is the first step of successful communication. However, most college students, including English majors who have received listening training, may score high in their exams of listening comprehension, fail to follow the standard English radio and TV news broadcasts, which actually is an important channel of improving listeners’ listening competence and can strengthen the basis for oral communication with the native speakers. Students’ poor listening competence is partly due to the inappropriate listening materials employed and the inefficient way practiced in listening comprehension.

The current college English teaching materials of listening is mainly textbooks compiled by college teachers, aiming at developing student s’ listening skills. A popular and well-edited textbook like “Step by Step”, co-edited by Professor Zhang Minlun has been widely used since the 1980s. It is successful in selecting and editing materials. But as the listening materials of the textbook it has become ‘outdated ’, they can hardly elicit student s’ interest and motivation. Besides, the items of exercises are mainly gap filling, multiple choice and summarized questions. Though student s can finish these exercises and score high in the exams in which they are evaluated, most of them in most cases can not successfully integrate their separate listening skills in listening to the English news. Years’ teaching experience of our college proves that combining in-class dictation of newscasts without-class reading of English newspaper is effective in imp roving students’ listening competence, in particular, for students of the pre-intermediate listening ability. The following is a presentation of this t raining app roach and it s advantages.

1. Motivation and Interest

According to Coakley and Wolvin, motivation to listening is, of course, an important affective factor. The listener must generate internally this motivation to at tend the aural stimulus. High-interest listening materials can encourage students to tune in to rather than tune out the foreign language. As the current English news broadcasts the latest world events, which are the daily topics of concern of college students, they have a strong desire in acquiring the information. This motivation will effectively elicit their interest in both in-class and out-class listening practice, promoting the smooth development of class activities and students’ active performance in dictating the news.

2. Authentic materials

An increasing number of linguists and foreign language educators (Belasco, 1981; Gilman and Moody, 1984; Meyer, 1984; Stevick 1984) emphasize the importance of authentic oral texts very early in the language experience. They believe that the linguistic knowledge upon which most textbooks are based is inadequate to describe the complexities of language and thus gives students misleading and perhaps erroneous information about the language. On the contrary, “real spoken language is motivated, it reflects the world, it relates to the listener, it is frequently accompanied by extra linguistic cues, it is highly redundant, and it happen s fast”(Meyer, 1984).

Moreover, the vocabularies employed in the news broadcast are highly frequent words, which can be easily accessed by students in their spare time in listening to the radio English programs, watching TV English programs, and reading English newspapers and magazines. Therefore, the authentic materials (tapes, records, radio, television and movies) of the kind are more preferred to the contrived texts in the training of listening comprehension skills and the improving of students’ English competence.

3. Dictation

As listening is a distinct, complex communication behavior, app roaches of teaching listening varies according to students’ specific needs. With the advent of oral approaches (especially Fries, 1945, 1961), listening was viewed as a problem of aural recognition of linguistic structures. Exercises to develop listening ability consist of various types of identification and discrimination, with verbatim reproduction (dictation) as a typical type of aural recognition. As observed above, college students are mainly trained by utilizing separate skills in order to finish the fixed item s of exercises of textbooks. Therefore, primacy is given to fluency over accuracy in their listening; they tend to focus on content words, contextual clues, and the communicative aspects of the situation in order to assign meaning. From the contextual clues they can guess and infer w hat the recording talks about, and bit s of fact s encoded in the message. Successful listeners can utilize both ‘inside the head’ knowledge and ‘out side the head’ knowledge to interpret what they hear. “The use of in side the head know ledge, that is, know ledge which is not directly encoded in words, is known as the top-down view of listening” (David Nunan). On the other hand, bottom-up skills play the same role in interpreting listening messages. “Bottom-up listening activities focus listeners on the individual elements and building block s of the language. Decoding oral utterances, discriminating between individual sounds, particularly those with minimal contrasts, and identifying different stress, rhythm and intonation patterns feather prominently in the early stages of learn ing, and the students is only gradually moved from sound to word to sentence to text”(David Nunan). In dictating the news broadcasts, students can be trained to utilize the separate skills and integrate the acquired skills to improve their listening skills---remembering a series of details, using contextual clues, recognizing organizational elements, drawing justifiable inferences, etc. They value linguistic accuracy more highly, and rely more on grammatical knowledge. While the bottom-up approach is mainly employed in dictating the news, due attention should be paid to the top-down view of listening. With the development of communicative approaches to language teach ing, and particularly with the increasing popularity of authentic materials, classroom activities have become more closely related to the sort s of thing learners are likely to w ant or need to do outside the classroom. Before dictating the news, one to three times of the tape recording will be played to student s and motivate them to grasp the gist of the new s, appropriate questions concerned can be provided for them to utilize the top-down approach in negotiating the ideas and catching the key words. In order to elicit their interest and active participation, such group activities as peer communication, group discussion or even sentence interpretation, etc, can be assigned for them to interact with each other, which can bring their own grammatical resources into play. It is proved that through student s’ active involvement, they come to confront their own strengths and weaknesses in English language use. In doing so, students find out w hat they don’t know, then they find out what they need to know and this is the process by which they imp rove their language skills.

4. Conclusion

In conclusion, in dictating the news broadcast s of VOA and BBC, the five language arts---listening, speaking, reading, writing, and interpretation are involved. A successful completion of the task calls for in-class active performance and out-class conscientious effort. However, there are restraints for the smooth carrying-out of this training approach by a number of other relevant factors, e.g., class size, students’ access to high-quality short-wave radio and recorders, and teachers’ heavy teaching load, etc. Among them, the high listen ing proficiency of teacher population is the foremost and critical condition.

All in all, the training approach is effective and fruitful in improving students’ listening competence. In the meantime, the improvement of students’ listening competence cultivates them a good habit of language acquisition by listening to the English news broadcasts, reading English newspaper and viewing the English TV program in their spare time, which is beneficial to their lifelong study and career development. If possible, the t rain ing app roach m ay also be utilized in the training of non-English majors who have passed Band 4 or Band 6 English test, it will be beneficial for their English competence and future employment in using English as a tool of communication.

Bibliography

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