2.5.3.2. Listening
According to Gamble and Gamble (2002, p.193), «Listening
is a deliberate process through which we seek to understand and retain aural
stimuli. Unlike hearing, listening depends on a complex set of skills that must
be acquired». They also propose a scale that illustrates the listening
levels-energy.
Figure 3: The scale of
listening levels-energy
Listening to help others
Active(emphatic listening)
Listening to analyse and generate content
Listening to retain content
Listening to understand content
Hearing
Requires greatest expenditure
of energy
Requires least expenditure of energy
Source: Gamble and Gamble (2002, p.194)
Ur (2002, p.105) says that «The objective of listening
comprehension in the classroom is that students should learn to function
successfully in real-life listening situations». Therefore, he provides a
list of listening situations which follows:
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LISTENING SITUATIONS
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Interview
Instructions
Loudspeaker announcement
Radio news
Committee meeting
Shopping
(c) Cambridge University Press 1996
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Theatre show
Telephone chat
Lesson, lecture
Conversation, gossip
Watching television
Story-telling
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Source: Ur (2002, p.105)
Ur (2002) states five characteristics of real-life listening
situations namely, the informal spoken discourse; listener expectation and
purpose; looking as well as listening; ongoing, purposeful listener response;
and speaker attention. Littlewood (1981) says that listening is often called a
passive skill but it demands active involvement from the hearer. In addition,
Abbott et al (1981) say that, despite their own experience in learning foreign
languages, many people seem to think that listening is fairly easy and
certainly much easier than speaking or writing. This assumption that listening,
contrary to other skills, is easy may be the basis on which many teachers don't
put much emphasis on teaching listening; however, ignoring the listening in
language teaching activities is also to ignore that it works complementarily
with other skills in oral communication process.
2.6. Instructional Technologies in Communicative Language
Teaching
Having heard someone speaking of instructional technologies in
language teaching, what comes first in mind is the equipment and materials used
to achieve some of the language teaching objectives. Here, the equipment is
referred to as the hardware which is needed either to display or to store
various types of auditory and/or visual information that can be used in the
language teaching.
For Lonergan (1984, p.118), «The term `hardware' is used
to refer to the machinery itself: the video recorder, the television set, and
so on». Then, materials are referred to as the software designed for
language teaching purposes and which are made active or productive when used
with appropriate equipment. That is why Lonergan (op cit., p.118) says,
«The software is what is needed to make the hardware
function. In the case of video recorder, the software is the video
tape».
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