Dear FLE 324 members,
You need to comment on the applicability and the effectiveness of the extensive listening approach together with an extensive reading approach to improve the lower-proficiency EFL learners' listening comprehension skills in the Turkish context. Please also comment on the effectiveness of the strategy training approach to improve the EFL learners' listening proficiency, the potential challenges of the extensive listening approach, along with the reading approach suggested in the article, for the EFL learners and teachers in the Turkish context.
(YOU NEED TO CHOOSE ONLY ONE OF THE OPTIONS (OPTION 1 AND OPTION 2)
I agree with the points that extensive reading has an important role for EFL learners' listening comprehension skills. When I was a student, I could not be able to catch the sounds and words. We also missed the gist or important details of spoken text. I strongly agree that extensive listening develops listening comprehension skills, word recognition and fluency. Thorough the extensive listening students simply do something that is pleasurable. It is helpful because learners get to do a lot of meaningful listening practice. Dictation and reading a loud will be more easy for students because they can get gestures and also it is slower than video records.
ReplyDeleteI realy believe the importance of extensive reading and listening. as we see in our young learners course that we got from Hasanbey,he also emphasized the importance of extensive reading for the students. because it provides students with ample amount of input.
ReplyDeletestudents will have a chance to see the structures for many times and in thi,s way, they can improve their certain language skills like cpomprehension, grammar and vocabulary.
extensive listening will also provide students with input and it will help students to improve themselves in terms of fluency, pronunciation and in terms of listening skills. for extensive reading, we do not need to use the class hours, we can assign students fot different books appropriate to their levels and they can read them outside of the classroom then they can prepare discussiob sheets about the topic or they may try to narrate the story to their classmates they can get comment and on different topics we can arrange debates.
I think that extensive reading and listening will be very helpful for improving students' language skills. firstly, they can improve their fluency in this way. they will have no need to scare. because they will do this activity outside of the classroom and they can read mnay times until they comnprehend the meaning of the sentences very well.
they can listen to the radios or they can watch series which they can be provided with the native speaker speech.
Merve Önder
I think listening and reading are very important fo learning a language and for acquiring a language, the importance of listening is more than the others. Because when we look at a child who learn his/her first language, s/he learns it by listening. Then he starts to use the language. In my opinion, as children do, we can learn the language with listening acivities. This also help us to teach the language,too. In the future, I want to provide my students with a lot of listening activities for their comprehension and I think these kind of activities are necessary for their correct use of pronuncitaion,too. If they learn the pronuncition from native or native like speakers, they can be more confident about their abilities later in the stages.
ReplyDeleteAlso extensive listening activities can be motivate students to lesson. I try to arrange songs, wideos, movies for my students which provide them with listen the language while enjoying. Of course I will try to arrange extensive listening and reading activities which are appropriate for their level. Because I know that if give them activities which they do not understand, they can feel frustrated and do not want to attend the activities.
All in all, I can say that, extensive listening and reading activities are highly very important for learning a language. As a prospective teachers, we should provide our students with these kinds of activities.
I totally agree with the article about the importance of extensive listening. Of course listening is not enough by itself but it is the most important and helpful one. Especially, extensive listening should be given importance a lot because we acquire a language, no matter it is the first or second language, by listening. So, listening is especially important for the young learners because at first, they need to listen in order to acquire a language. however; we should also emphasize that we will need some enjoyable and authentic materials in order to be able to get our students' attention for a long span. Also, these materials should be meaningful for them. For example; if our material is something that they already know about, most probably this listening course will not work. Also, if the listening record is too fast or too slow for our learners, this course will not work too because our students won't be able to catch up the record. Our listening course should include understandable records for example there shouldn't be strange pronunciations so that the learners could get the general meaning. Extensive listening activities can be motivating for the students because these activities will be really authentic and we could say that the students may feel themselves as if they were in England or in USA or something like that and this fact will encourage them to speak. Our materials should include the vocabulary that our students are already engaged with, otherwise they will be bored and afraid of the listening tasks. With the help of extensive listening our students will be able to get rid of their anxities day by day. At first, they may be afraid of listening and speking activities but if we provide them with the materials mentioned above, they will see that they could succeed and they will be encouraged. As we all know the function of a language is to be able to communicate. If you can't speak or listen, understand the spoken language, then what is the point of knowing a language?
ReplyDeleteWhen we think how did we learn our first language we can undestand the importance of the extensive listening. A baby hears some words and sentences from his her environment.Upon this he or she develops his/her language.Actually if a baby speaks the only language that she or he hears but not any other language, this means that listening plays the most important role in the language learning. also the dumb people can not speak even if they do not have any problem with articulary system.all these exmples shows us the importance of the listening. Also we can say that listening is more effective from reading. Because even if i child or baby does not read anything which is related with his or language s/he can learn his or her language.Morever; through listenings students get acquainted with the target language culture. They learn the linguistic structure of the target language.Apart from these they have opportunity to hear the language from a native spaeker.So they get true pronouncation inputs. Unfortunately, even if the listening has such important place in learning a language the FLE students have limited opportunities for listening. They genarally make listenings in the classroom. even if they know the grammar of the language and they have enough vocabulary knowledge, the students can not speak due to pronouncation problems. So the listenings just in the classroom are not enough for a language learner. Also the teacher may choose a listening which is appropriate for the level og the students. But a language learner can coose the leval of the listening axxording to himself or herself. Also s/he can make it repeat it many times which is not always possible in the classroom. If that person wants to be succesful in target language she or her should make extensive listening.
ReplyDeleteExtensive reading is also very important.Generally learners do such learning both pleasure and to learn a language. And they choose reading that they like. Because they read what they like. the nagative effect of the Affective Filter is eliminated. so in this way they will make more reading. Because they do not see as a homework or a task but pleasure.Extensive reading also can support the listening. That develops the comprehensibility of the inputs that they hear. For example;by making extensive reading the students can undertands the future readings better.And it is ceratin that this stduents will undertand the sententences that hear better.
I ma the one of the supporters of the extensive reading and listening. what we read and listen in class is not enough for the students, because as time is limited we can give really limited activities and these are not enough for learning a new language. I have seen it in practice, I am teaching the students who are going to take the METU proficiency exam and one of the girl whose level is pre-intermediate group gets 18 out of 20 in listening because of her extensive listening. when I asked she said that she has been listening songs a lot during her high school years and that is why she is good at listening. so we should suggest extensive reading and listening to our students.
ReplyDeleteKnowing a language means listening,writing,reading and speaking in that language. It is not enough to learn a language only in classroom. To develop our language we should support our input. This can only be done by extensive activities. Extensive reading and listening one of the important points in language learning. Extensive reading helps students to understand the language, gains students a rich vocabulary, gain students a rich understanding of the language. Extensive reading, especially in native language, helps students to have a better pronunciation skill. When students get used to the language, their speaking will also be developed. We cannot learn a language only in the classrrom. As we do more extensive activities, it will be our life style and this will strength our learning.
ReplyDeleteI also believe the importance of extensive reading and listening. Because in the class we cannot have enough input to improve our reading and listening skills which are crucial for a successful communication. With the help of extensive reading and listening we can get enough input we need to communicate. Moreover, extensive reading and listening help the students to improve their grammar and vocabulary knowledge. Because they come across a lot of structures and vocabulary they don't see in the classroom environment. Furthermore, class hours are limited to do all the activities in the class environment. So it is very beneficial to do some extensive reading and listening interms of ample amount of comprehensible input. As extensive listening the students can watch movies in native language it is good for their gaining native speaker fluency and improving their pronunciation.
ReplyDeleteConclusively, extensive reading and listening is very helpful for the students to get ample, pleasurable and comprehensible input.
I also agree with the point that extensive reading is important in terms of improving students' language skills. As extensive reading occurs outside the classroom, it is a perfect possibility for especially shy students. They feel free outside the classroom. Extensive listening is also helpful for students in terms of developping pronounciation and fluency. They will also be readier when they come to class.As a conclusion, reading aloud and extensive listening contributes much to the students of foreign language.
ReplyDeleteI had a chance to listen Krashen in the conference, which is famous among our dept. students. He talked about reading in terms of developing language skills. He advised everybody to make students read. The text doesn't matter. Being appropriate for their level is enough. Reading keeps the brain busy and working. It is like oiling a machine which has a lot of chains and wheels. Extensive listening is also effective in the same way. With the help of songs, series or movies students get aware of the informal forms of a language. They can hear the forms that they don't have a chance to learn in classroom. If they keep their ears occupied with target lanugage, their skills of listening should improve, doubtlessly. Reading aloud can be helpful, as well. Listening inappropriate things may be a challenge for teacher. He can't control each students' extensive listening.
ReplyDeleteWhen i was a high school prep student, the listening part was almost the problematic one. As Renandya and Farrell (2011) mentions, because the background knowledge was limited, to most of the students, even though it was in an appropriate level, the pace seemed quite fast and we had trouble in understanding what was being told. However, what we listened to did matter. There was a storyboard about high school students at the beginning of every unit and when that part was being played we had so much fun and 'somehow' we understood every part of it. But when a lecture was given we had trouble in comprehending it. It is mentioned in Renandya and Farrell (2011)'s article that the element of "fun" actually affects the rate of comprehension as much as the difficulty level of the listening. Maybe that is the reason why, nowadays instructors of my third or fourth language recommend me that i should listen to songs or watch films with subtitles as much as i read. Extensive reading means additional input and when learning a language you should be able to 'comprehend' as well as you 'produce' - both in written and verbal ways. And in order to produce, we first need to understand. That is the reason why extensive listening is important.
ReplyDeleteCeren Korkmaz
Sedef KONUK
ReplyDeleteTaking my language learning life into consideration, a language can't be learnt only studying in a classroom with the help of a teacher. It is a process requiring extra efforts such as extensive reading and extensive listening. the more we are exposed to target language input, the more we master the language. for example I can say that my english improved thanks to the series, films or news that I watch in my free time. ıt may be seen they are just for pleasure but it shouldn't be ignored that they are really rich sources for us in terms of vocabulary, language's daily usage and structures as well. both extensive reading and listening is very beneficial for our understanding of language, our pronunciation, our fluency and our knowledge of vocabulary. It is very clear that extensive reading and listening should be indispensible for a student to learn and to be able to use the language. The teachers should also encourage the students to make lots of reading and listening out of the classroom environment.
Fatma Kaya
ReplyDeleteAs many of my friends mentioned a language can not be learned by studying in classroom environment only. Therefore, extensive reading is a very beneficial way of studying a language out of classroom environment. With this method students can be exposed to more language input, which is the core part of language acquisition. Reading outside classroom is also a good motivator for students, for example if they read something for fun, they unconsciously acquire some language input and they don not feel this process. This leads to language acquisition. In a classroom environment they can feel like they are forced to learn something and this may create some barriers hindering acquisition. Extensive reading and extensive listening materials are valuable sources considering they provide input in many aspects. For example by listening a song or watching a film, students can learn vocabulary items and their pronunciations from native speakers. Today internet is also a valuable source for our students which is rich in terms of extensive reading and listening materials. Using internet they can reach many sources. We should encourage our students to use internet appropriately guiding them to useful sources. However, with the lower levels this may be a problem but we should provide our students with graded series. Course books could also give additional CDs which are good sources of listening materials for graded levels. We as a teacher should guide them to the right material, in a way we could teach them how to use these materials to benefit them by intensive listening and reading sessions.
Listening is so difficult for the learners because we have a little control over the speakers. When we do not understand something, we do not have a chance to stop and think about the speakers’ saying. We can just want the speaker to repeat again. Therefore, it is different from the reading. While reading, we have a chance to stop, return and read again or look up a dictionary when we do not understand anything. Extensive reading and listening is helpful for the learners. The more input they get, the more they can understand what they read and listen in time so extensive reading and listening should be improved. Students’ extensive reading can be improved by teachers in class. For example, teacher can bring newspapers to the class. When they regularly read them, after a while they get used to reading and after the class they started to read. Also teacher can give homework. Students can read journals or books and teacher wants them to summarize what they read in the class. Finding resources for the extensive reading is simple in comparison to the extensive listening. Teacher should find proper songs, movies and films to suggest his/ her students but in this era finding a film, movie without bad words is so difficult. However, teacher should search and find proper resources. Listening has a lot of difficulties. We can overcome them with the extensive listening. If students listen something which they understand, their self confidence will increase and they will like the listening. When they have to listen something, they are not afraid of listening. Moreover, they will have enough input and they will easily understand it. In the article, also they mention about the strategic training in listening. I do not find it useful. Of course, a teacher should know the strategies to improve the listening but should not trust them to improve listening. It requires so much time and one strategy do not work for all of the students. An overemphasis on strategy training may undermine the value of practice, which plays a critical role in the acquisition of procedural knowledge in language learning like listening skills. As a conclusion, extensive listening is better than the strategy training to improve listening.
ReplyDeleteİlknur Kaya
ReplyDeleteI believe that extensive reading and extensive listening have a crucial importance in the language acquisition.Pleasurability of input has also important to acquire a language thus one read or listen a material which is pleasurable for him/her comprehends easily likewise acquisition takes place faster.Furthermore as my friend stated language can not be acquired only in the classroom enviroment so daily usages, some expressions can be acquired with the help of extensive reading and listening.I describe them as the rich and enjoyable sources of input. Watching films,listening songs, reading graded books, and other authentic materials are rich sources in terms of vocabulary, structures, pronunciation etc.These materials also make students feel free in the language acquisition process in that it doesn't restrict students to the classroom environment(intensive reading listening); it let students use their own methods and potentials considering language acquisition.
how krashen says if the person has proper input he will definitely learn the lanaguge with no matter of the age factors. therefore, i also think that if the student gets proper and extensive input he will be able speak the language and use the language as he is supposed to be. if there is no improvement in language one will not be able to perform. knowledge is important so intensive listening and reading are very very very and very important...
ReplyDeleteI think extensive reading and listening is very important for language acquisition. In my opinion, it is a fundamental mistake to consider sustained silent reading as supplemental or optional. Extensive reading (or listening) is the only way in which learners can get access to language at their own comfort level, read something they want to read, at the pace they feel comfortable with, which will allow them to meet the language enough times to pick up a sense of how the language fits together. In addition, it is impossible for us as prospective teachers to teach a ‘sense’ of language. We do not have time, and it is not our job. It is the learners’ job to get that sense for themselves. This depth of knowledge of language must, and can only, be acquired through constant massive exposure. Course books will never be enough to teach or expose everything. Learners have to pick these up as they meet the language, as well as tens of thousands of other collocations and colligations and useful phrases. It is a massive task that requires massive amounts of reading and listening.
ReplyDeleteI am a supporter of extensive reading,listening in classroom environment. We may not find time to read or listen a text in an intensive way so we can not ask our students to read or listen it in that way. If we ask our students to listen intensively, they will probably can not catch lots of words and they feel themselves frustrated. This is also valid for reading lessons.
ReplyDeleteI think the extensive reading and listening have a great influence on the students' abilities. Because of the limited time, the students cannot listen and read in the target language in a lesson period so the students will benefit from the readings and the listening made outside the classroom. Through extensive listening, the students can develop more understanding ability of the context and they have more vocabulary knowledge. Moreover, they have more professional pronunciation in the target language. The extensive reading is a good way to develop pronunciation and while reading something, one can provide input himself/ herself and again it is a really effective way to learn vocabulary. I advise to do extensive reading and listening for all of the language learners.
ReplyDeletegenerally in our classrooms we make intensive reading and listening According to the article we do not teach students how to read or listen we only parctice in the classroom and we do not give enough importance to extensive reading and listening. The article says that giving input to stduents is impotrant.The best way to make the language fluency perfect is to make a lot of listening and reading .So the teachers should not only force students to listen something in the classroom. because the speaker we listen in classroom generally speaks fast and the students have difficulty to understand it. So when they are asked students say that listening is the activity thay do not like most. So we shoul make our students not to fear from it.
ReplyDeleteExtensive listening and reading should be done by all of the students at the lower levels. Basically these two are input contributing to the development of outputs – writing and speaking. We can also see kind of application in early years and primary school – students in their L1 are listening to their parents and are engaged in reading simple stories in L1.
ReplyDeleteMoreover, both of them, if the schedule and frequency is monitored (by parents, for example) and done properly, can be assigned as homework and as a result huge amount of class hours would not be wasted. It s also important for students to have reading habits so that this type of homework would not be difficult for them – on the contrary – they could enjoy reading by themselves and develop themselves as personalities.
It is a nice idea to use extensive reading and listening in all types of institution, probably on all levels to contribute to the development of L2.
I agree with the points that extensive reading has an important role for EFL learners' listening comprehension skills. When I was a student, I could not be able to catch the sounds and words. We also missed the gist or important details of spoken text. I strongly agree that extensive listening develops listening comprehension skills, word recognition and fluency. Thorough the extensive listening students simply do something that is pleasurable. It is helpful because learners get to do a lot of meaningful listening practice. Dictation and reading a loud will be more easy for students because they can get gestures and also it is slower than video records.
ReplyDeleteDeveloping students’ listening skills requires firstly defining the barriers of listening clearly and then abolishing them. According to Zeng’s study results, students report that listening difficulties are caused by speaking rate, distraction, inability to recognize words they knew, new vocabulary, missing subsequent input, nervousness, sentence complexity, background knowledge, anxiety and frustration and unfamiliar pronunciation. Strategy training is offered as a solution to all these problems. This strategy training approach may be useful in some aspects but its applicability is quite low because it requires the teachers to know;
ReplyDelete theories and principles behind strategy training
how to select the strategies that the students need to learn
the order in which these strategies should be presented and practised
how to integrate these strategies into the curriculum
how much time should be allocated for strategy training.
As the article says these requirements are really above the level most of the teachers can handle due to lack of teacher’s training and time limit. And also a subject of a strategy training study says that “The strategies may be good, but they are not so useful for me. I mean it doesn’t really help me when I listen.” Thus, the strategy training is proven to be an unrealistic and not helpful idea for improving listening skills of students.
Instead of the strategy training, the article offers to apply the extensive reading methods for the listening skill. The study has resulted positively as one of the subjects say:
“. . . at the beginning of the extensive listening programme, there were many words that sounded familiar tome. But I just couldn’t think of their meanings immediately. When I tried to recall their meanings, I always missed the sentences that came after. Now I feel that I am better at catching the words in the sentences....”
Extensive listening includes simple and enjoyable listening activities such as dictation and teacher read-alouds, narrow listening (listening to text of the same topics and genres), repeated listening, and listening while reading (for example audio books). We can conclude from all these studies that extensive reading are more effective, more enjoyable and more simply to integrate into curriculum than strategy training method.
As for the usage of these methods in Turkey, I think strategy training has a very small chance of being effective because if the strategy is applied, it’s sure that some of the students forget the strategies and some won’t have time to think about them. Thus the method can be successful for only a small number of students and it doesn’t worth the time and effort given to this strategy training. On the other hand, I can’t think of any problem or obstacle other than time limit to use extensive listening method. However as the article says, some of the teachers in Turkey expect students to improve their listening on their own without giving them a clue and leave students helpless.
Kübra Şahinoğlu
I think language learning process must consist four basic skills but it may not be possible because of the time limitation and having the obligation to tell about grammatical rules or the context itself. Therefore, extensive reading is one of the best way to apply in a formal education, I mean if the learner is already a student, assigning extensive reading will help him a lot, but it cannot be possible with older working learners because the time limitation that the teacher had in a classroom environment is encountered in a private course with a learner working in the daytime. Also, students feel easy about the target language and can control the fear of learning it by extensive readings because extensive reading can be done with a pace the learner decides,therefore making the input as comprehensible as possible is done by the learner himself.
ReplyDeleteI totally agree with the article about the importance of extensive listening. Of course listening is not enough by itself but it is the most important and helpful one.Listening itself is so difficult for the learners because we have a little control over the speakers. When we do not understand something, we do not have a chance to stop and think about the speakers’ saying. We can just want the speakeOf course listening is not enough by itself but it is the most important and helpful r to repeat again. Therefore, it is different from the reading. While reading, we have a chance to stop, return and read again or look up a dictionary when we do not understand anything. Extensive reading and listening is helpful for the learners. The more input they get, the more they can understand what they read and listen in time so extensive reading and listening should be improved. Students’ extensive reading can be improved by teachers in class. For example, teacher can bring newspapers to the class.Extensive listening activitieson the other side can be motivating for the students because these activities will be really authentic and we could say that the students may feel themselves as if they were in England or in USA or something like that and this fact will encourage them to speak. Our materials should include the vocabulary that our students are already engaged with, otherwise they will be bored and afraid of the listening tasks. With the help of extensive listening our students will be able to get rid of their anxities day by day.Finally,the teachers should also encourage the students to make lots of reading and listening out of the classroom environment.
ReplyDeleteI think extensive reading and listening is very important for language acquisition. Language learning process must consist four basic skills but it may not be possible because of the time limitation and having the obligation to tell about grammatical rules or the context itself. Therefore, extensive reading is one of the best way to apply in education. According to the article we do not teach students how to read or listen we only practice in the classroom and we do not give enough importance to extensive reading and listening. The article says that giving input to students is important.The best way to make the language fluency perfect is to make a lot of listening and reading . Otherwise, I can give examples from my high school English courses. Our teachers gave importance only to grammar and vocabulary and as a result we were so poor in understanding. I trieed to compensate for this by watching series and movies or listening to songs but it was not fully efficient. In my opinion, learning a language is something complete and extensive listening can not be taken apart from other parts.
ReplyDelete