Listening+strategies+Cecii

Heffernan, N. (2005). Watching movie trailers in the ESL class. //The internet TESL Journal, 6//(3).

This research discusses about the importance that computer assisted language learning (CALL) has in students of a second language (L2), and how the teacher can take advantage of this resource by watching movie trailers in class. Neil Heffernan pointed out that using computers when learning a second language has been very common in the recent years. This author also mentioned that students of L2 have the opportunity to practice the four skills (listening, grammar, writing and speaking) by incorporating the CALL in the classes. In addition, he found that if students like watching movies, the teacher can use this strategy in order for them to learn the second language by creating activities in which students have to watch movies trailers. The results show that students do learn vocabulary, and check pronunciation by doing this kind of activities.

The use of internet has become very popular in language teaching. I as an English teacher have the chance to play with this technology, and create activities related to the internet that help students to learn the language. I believe that watching movies trailers is a good tool for them to practice and to achieve my objective as a teacher. But I have to be careful when it would be useful or not, because sometimes they just watch the movie or the video with not objective, and this becomes funny for them, but the activity has not sense. I think __this__ type of activities encourage students to activate the listening skill, because they are focusing on understand what people is saying in the movie trailers and what the movie is about.

Ching-Shyang, A. (2008). Listening strategies of L2 learners with varied test tasks. //TESL Canada Journal, 25//(2), pp. 1-20.

Anna Ching-Shyang Chang in her article “Listening strategies of L2 learners with varied test tasks” focuses on the strategies that learners of L2 used and the way they applied those strategies to understand the spoken English. In the research, she states four parts of listening support such as: previewing questions, repeated input, background information preparation, and vocabulary instruction. Twenty-two students answered the test in which the main objective was to take into account their listening anxiety levels. The results indicated that the listening test task strategies influenced in the listening strategies of the students. This author also found that either anxious or non-anxious students knew how to handle with the given information before the test.

Listening anxiety is a factor that complicates the process of listening comprehension in learners of second language (L2), but it all depends on the strategies that students use in order to get high score in a listening test. By reading this article I realized that I have a hard role in teaching because every single student will be different, they have a specific way to learn something and each one of them will use different strategies to comprehend the second language. I will have to deal with all these aspects and I have to pay attention, for example in the listening skill because this skill is the most complicated for them. I saw in the results that pre-listening activities are useful for students before the test because this helps them to have closer ideas to the listening test. Moreover, this article helped me to understand how anxious students would be before a test, even when they had studied. Finally, the relationship that this feeling has to the low score they could get in a test.