JOURNAL OF LANGUAGE TEACHING AND RESEARCH
© 2012 ACADEMY PUBLISHER
B] has been outside
C] likes cold weather
3. Guess/Infer the question from the answers.
4. Hear the question: “Which statement is true about the woman?”
5. Focus on the key sentence: “You’ve been inside all morning.”
6. Find and choose ”[B] She has been outside today.”
IV. CONCLUSION AND IMPLICATIONS
In an EFL listening comprehension classroom, it is imperative that teachers provide their students with authentic
materials [Breen, 1985; Lindsay & Knight, 2006; Taylor, 1994] as much as possible. Teaching materials adopted should
be related to learners’ background knowledge, interest and curiosity as evidences [MacDonald, Bager, & White, 2000]
show a positive correlation between learner authenticity and students’ learning achievement. Authentic social situations
based on the content of listening materials used in the classroom should be re-emerged where students can transform
simulated communication into authentic communication and further apply the simulated practice into real world
communication. According to MacDonald et al. [2000], the more the listening material is related to students’ experience
and background knowledge and allows the students to interact with it, the better they understand and learn.
Designing step by step listening activities through pre-listening, listening and post-listening tasks [refer to Lindsay &
Knight, 2006] help learners meet classroom authenticity, reach learner authenticity, and motivate them to communicate
with the texts and other learners in the classroom. In doing so, learning and teaching goals and purposes can be reached
and, in turn, students’ listening comprehension proficiency can be enhanced. In addition, as a saying goes, “Practice
makes perfect”, students’ devoting themselves to practicing doing listening comprehension tests as much as possible
pays off.
Equally crucial for learners is to acknowledge their own listening difficulties or weaknesses and learn from the
mistakes. It is, more often than not, lexical and syntactic problems are detrimental to their listening comprehension
[Wenden, 199], for example learners’ limited vocabulary and lack of understanding of discourse genres contributing to
listening difficulties [Goh, 1997]. Learners’ inefficient memory and unfamiliarity with intonation, stress, special accents,
idioms and slang of a foreign language [Wenden, 1991] also act as hampers to their listening comprehension. Speedy
speeches add to the gravity of the listening comprehension impediments. Personal traits, for instance sluggishness,
timidity and reserve, as opposed to activity, liveliness and vivacity, harmfully impact students’ achievement in listening
comprehension [Wenden, 1991]. Physical hindrances also pose as negative effects. Listeners in an emotional status, for
example stress, nervousness or anxiety, are inclined to be disadvantageous in listening comprehension; likewise, people
who suffer from physical problems like fatigue or illness are likely to be in a similarly negative situation.
On the part of teachers, providing students with gimmicks [i.e. Skim, Scan, Listen, Guess/Infer, Choose & Write and
Check] on how to answer questions effectively enhances students’ achievement in taking listening comprehension tests.
More importantly, students have to engage themselves in an active, rather than passive, persistent, rather than impatient,
and long-term commitment to learning English as a foreign language as “Rome is not built in one day”.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
The author of this paper would like to extend gratitude to National Science Council in Taiwan for its research grants
[NSC99-2410-H-167-002].
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