📚My Thesis Blog📚

Daniel Páez

✔ Problem ✔

To begin, listening is an important language skill that models language in students to understand sounds, accents and pronunciation. Also, this skill helps students to communicate because it is necessary understanding in order to provide ideas. In that way, teaching listening should focus on resources that can provide meaningful knowledge in an attractive way. However, in previous observations carried out at a public school called "Unidad Educativa Nicolas Martinez" located in Ambato - Ecuador, it was possible to perceived that there was a lack of exposure to listening skill materials in most of basic levels and the classes were focused mostly on grammar and reading. In fact, the material they use for listening classes are only books, script conversations and copies, leaving aside the incorporation of audio and videos in the teaching process. For this reason, students present low performance in the development of listening activities and they have many difficulties to understand simple instructions, but another important problem is that students get bored easily because the book contents do not engage them due to the complexity of terms, vocabulary and mostly the topics are not interesting at all. 

     💢Theory and approach related💢

This research work was based on constructivist and social-constructivist apprach by Piaget. Constructivist approach is about learners constructing their own knowledge by themselves working in an independent way (Piaget, 1977). Considering the last fact, it is appropriate to state that learning theories and taching methods and strategies are involved by constructivism. For instance, cartoons considered as an authentic material for listening purposes permit learners relate the real-world content to develop listening comprehension in order to learn through experiences that can be linked in the world context. In other words, learners receive information in order to associate them to their previous knowledge or experience in sequence they are able to create new meanings while learning.

🔎Main Categories🔎 

Independent Variable Theoretical Support:

TEACHING ENGLISH LANGUAGE

Teaching a foreign language is a challenge for any teacher, but at the same time it is important that teachers have a good training and the skills established to achieve the objectives of education. In addition, it is important to have good training in schools and adapt them so that the classroom experience is excellent. Furthermore, teaching English as a foreign language involves being able to convey the English language in an articulate and interesting manner. TEFL educators encourage students to improve their English skills through listening, speaking, reading, and writing. TEFL is often facilitated through the use of course books, audio-visual aids, and technology-based materials. In addition to formal instruction, informal exercises, such as role playing and language games, are often used. According (Jordan, 2015). Teaching a foreign language involves not only the abilities to transmit grammatical, structural knowledge of a foreign language. The teaching of a language goes further, for example that leads you to know a new world where different cultures, traditions and knowledge are handled that may be unknown to many but in the end, it opens the doors to an intercultural world.

 METHODOLOGIES

The use of methodology in education allows teacher to consider techniques, resources and methods that they are going to be used taking into account students needs, but it is really important to understand the educational context to choose any methodology in order to get better result at the end. So that, students will be motivated, and their knowledge will be important to be evaluated. According to Rodgers (2001), the purpose of methodologies is to get an educational instruction that can be useful for learners in learning process. Also, it allows teachers to have a different perspective of how to develoop the class introducing concepts, establishing ideas in order to simplify the teacher output obtaining better results at the end of the class. On the other hand, from learners perspective, they are going to feel motivated in class with a different instruction than the traditional one. Finally, methodologies are important to identify students difficulties and abilities in order to satisfy their needs changing some elements of the methodolody if it is required.

RESOURCES

The teaching resources are a support material aimed at teachers with the aim of helping teachers and students during class development. There are different types of didactic resources such as authentic, audiovisual, technological and everything related to supplements that help students so that the class is better presented and at the same time can be better understood. During the last years, the didactic resources have invaded the classrooms in the institutions, this is because the technology and technological resources allow us to transfer many functions to the classrooms through screens and speakers that allow an endless number of activities that are useful for students. According to Wright (2019), the use of online resources for teachers can save time and make your lesson plans more interesting. For new teachers, these resources can help establish lesson plans and give a feel for what kind of material each lesson should cover. For teachers with years of experience, these resources can help refresh old lesson plans and introduce new teaching methods, keeping teachers up to date with the most current developments.

AUTHENTIC MATERIAL (CARTOONS)

The cartoons can become a very useful material within the class. This is because many of the cartoons handle excellent vocabulary for learners and at the same time you can practice skills such as listening, speaking to strengthen many weaknesses. In addition, this allows students to engage in class through cartoons that are very appealing to students. It is  believed that authentic materials are useful media, which can be used to relate between classroom and  the  real  world. Authentic materials help to  give  motivation the  students learn the language, and they will feel that they are learning the real language. Underwood (1984)  said  that  a much more  real  act  of communication is heard by the learners  by  using authentic materials learners are given a real representation speech with hesitation, false starts and mistakes which will help the learner to master with the real life speech when they meet it in other situation or the teaching-learning process.

Dependent Variable Theoretical Support:

LANGUAGE SKILLS

To begin, in the educational field are four basic skills divided into productive skills which are speaking and writing, and receptive skills as reading and listening. Some pedagogues states that is appropriate to divide skills because each one has different purposes in order to develop language communication in any written or spoken form. However, in textbooks or some updated the definitios of what productive or receptive skill is. On the other hand, English as universal language has many communicative intentions that are related to different fields around the world which makes it a overuse language. In this case, English is taught and evaluated in terms of four skills; listening, speaking, reading and writing. Listening and reading are called “receptive" while productive are writing and speaking. According to Osorio (2017), learning a second language means be able to understand, speak, listen in write in the target language considering the language sub skills which are very important to master the general skills

RECEPTIVE SKILLS

Receptive skills can be defined as the ability students to receive the information that is being transmitted by the interlocutor and it can be auditory or visual reception, so the skills that are involved are listening and reading. Furthermore, student of a second language never be limited to only receive information, they wanto to produce language.In that way, both productive and receptive skills should be strengthened at the same level. According to Ramirez (2016) he affirms that students need to use sounds and rhythms of the language, so they  are able can understand and produce language by themselves. It is clear that learners must be exposed to an environment in which they can receive messages, sounds, rythms, accents, etc and at the same time can produce dialogue in order to communicate effectively. For instance, teacher can use different resources to foster learning and create an aproppiate environment to exhange language in meaning.

LISTENING COMPREHENSION

Listening comprehension is a complex process and essential during the development of second language learning, so the importance of listening in language learning has only been recognized recently. The role of listening comprehension in language learning was overlooked or misunderstood, regarding to a research and pedagogical attention in the past. But nowadays, some researchers have decided some time to listening and believe it to be an important skill in teaching and learning. Furthermore, Nunan (2002) believes that: listening is the basic skill in language learning. Without listening skill, learners will never learn to communicate effectively. As listening is assuming greater importance in foreign language classrooms and in language acquisition researchers have tried to do some studies of this skill. One idea that has been of focus is the role of the listener as an active person and the type of knowledge that the professor brings to the context of listening skill taking into account students’ needs in class for a long term. 

LISTENING SKILL

Listening skill has to be developed very slowly since although it is the one that is most put into practice to learn a new language it is important that each sub skill is developed through specific activities that complement a good learning. For example, listening for detail or listening for gist are sub skills that strengthen our skills and little by little, successful results are expected when put into practice with native speakers or audios that require a higher level of understanding. The ability to listen is the key to effectively receiving messages. It's a combination of what's listening says another person and psychological involvement with the person who speaks. Listening is a language skill. It requires the desire to understand another person, an attitude of respect and acceptance and the willingness to open the mind to try to see things from the perspective of another requires a high level of concentration and energy. It demands that we set ours aside own thoughts and agendas, put us in the place of others and try to see the world through it eyes of the person.

 

Bibliography:

 Jordan. G (2015, Agosto). Innovative Methods of Teaching English Language. Journal Of Humanities And Social Science, 19(8), 62- 65.

Nunan, D. (2002). Listening in language learning. Methodology in language teaching: An anthology of current practice, 238-241.

Ramirez. F (2016). Receptive Language Skills Learning and Teaching: Listening and Reading. Publicaciones Didáticas, 153-371. Retrieved from 

Rodgers, T. S. (2001). Language Teaching Methodology. ERIC Issue Paper.

Osorio, T. (2017). CROSSLINGUISTIC INFLUENCE AND CONCEPTUAL TRANSFER: WHAT ARE THE CONCEPTS. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, 25, 3-25. doi:10.1017/S0267190505000012

Underwood, J. H. (1984). Linguistics, Computers, and the Language Teacher. A Communicative Approach. Newbury House Publishers, Inc., Rowley, MA 01969.

Wright, W. E. (2010). Foundations for teaching English language learners: Research, theory, policy, and practice. Caslon Pub..