The first hurdle that the teacher must overcome in developing auditory memory and in promoting the acquisition of listening skills is the short attention span and poor listening habits that many students have. The teacher should impress on the students the importance of careful and constant listening in class. They must be aware of the need to listen more attentively in language class than in other classes. Brooks (1964) states that they must hear three to five times as much in a language class as in the normal class. The reason for this extra concentration lies in the fact that in their own language they do not need to listen so carefully. Their ability in the language has reached the point at which they know what to expect from the language. Therefore, they know how to discard the redundant and unnecessary elements of the message and even to fill in those parts that they may have missed. Of course, this is the goal in the second language also, but at the beginning levels that ability in unstructured situations is quite far away. In the introduction to language and in subsequent introductions to new sequences, the students must pay complete attention to all the components of the code before attaining true listening comprehension.
While the teacher is stressing to the students the importance of improving their listening habits and explaining why they must concentrate more fully in language class, she should also contrast the language class, in which listening plays such an important role, with other classes in which most of the learning may be visual. She should make the students realize that both auditory and visual learning play a large role in language classes and that both the eyes and the ears can be learning and memory aids.
In the introduction to a class in which a great deal of emphasis is placed on listening, the teacher should also spend a few moments discussing the discomfort and uneasiness that such a class may cause. There is no reason to become frustrated while reading because the opportunity of turning back, rereading a section, or pausing to meditate is always present. Such is not the case in listening. Whether it is understood or not, the stream of speech continues. Therefore, the students should expect to feel a certain strain in the early stages of language learning as they strive to cope with this problem. They should be encouraged not to pause to reflect on any given phrase, but to stay with the speaker even if they do not understand everything, just as the water skier hopes to stay with his skis, they should try to stay with the stream of speech. The teacher should encourage the students to voice their feelings of frustration if the need arises during the course of the semester. She can make adjustments in her expectations, and she can make arrangements to provide additional listening comprehension activities to help them improve their listening skills. This additional practice can be provided by the teacher, by the students themselves, or by commercially prepared materials in the classroom or language laboratory.
As desirable as it may be to get the students to listen, the question of how to listen remains. Following are some pointers the teacher should keep in mind in order to stimulate student attentiveness in class. At the risk of duplicating advice given in chapter 15, "General Guidelines for Teaching a Second Language," some of those, in no specific order of importance, are being listed here:
1. Tell the students why they need to listen.
2. Explain the frustrations that may accompany attempts to comprehend the spoken second language.
3. Call on students in random order. Keep them guessing as to who is next.
4. Expect and encourage participation. They must listen to participate.
5. Keep the pace moving at a clip sufficient to maintain interest.
6. Be interested yourself in what is going on.
7. Have fun. Occasional laughter will do as much as anything to keep some students involved in class activities.
8. Select content to which the students can relate.
9. Provide a variety of activities.
10. Be responsive to student ideas and input in the class. Nothing is so interesting as to see one's own idea incorporated into some future class.
11. Give them material worth listening to and at a level consistent with their capabilities.
12. Do not permit students not to listen. Students who spend day after day in your class wandering listlessly through a dream world of their own cannot be successful second-language learners.
Listening Comprehension 287