第9章听力教学TASK 1In your English learning experience, did you find listening more difficult? What are the main difficulties you have encountered? Can you think of any reasons why listening is a difficult skill to develop? Work in groups and pool your ideas.Key: The main difficulties may be quickly forgetting what is heard and unable to recognise words they know. The main reason why listening is so difficult to develop is that listening is often neglected in language teaching due to lack of teaching materials, both with print materials and audio or video tapes, lack of equipment in some schools; and lack of real-life situations where language learners need to understand spoken English.TASK 2How many situations can you think of where you listen to other people in our native language? Work with a partner and think about all the different situations where you need to listen in a routine day.Key: The following list is adapted from Ur, 1996: 105.TASK 3Below is a list of situations where Chinese people may need to listen to English. Choose eight situations that you think are the most frequent. When you are ready, go into groups of 4 and pool what you have chosen.Key:□telephone conversations about business√radio news in English√lessons or lectures given in English√conversations with foreigners□instructions in English√watching television in English√watching movies in English□shop assistants who sell goods to foreigners□deal with tourists□interviews with foreign-enterprises√international trade fairs□socialise with foreigners√negotiations with foreign businesses√Listening to English songs□hotel and restaurant servicesTASK 4Look back at the list of listening situations in Tasks 3. Judge the situations according to the following criteria:·Formal or informal?·Rehearsed or non-rehearsed?·Can the listener interact with the speaker or not?Key:√radio news in English (formal, rehearsed, the listener cannot interact with the speaker)√lessons or lectures given in English (formal, non-rehearsed, the listener can interact with the speaker)√conversations with foreigners (informal, non-rehearsed, the listener can interact with the speaker)√watching television in English (formal or informal, rehearsed or non-rehearsed, the listener cannot interact with the speaker)√watching movies in English (informal, rehearsed, the listener cannot interact with the speaker)√international trade fairs (formal, non-rehearsed, the listener can interact with the speaker)√negotiations with foreign businesses(formal, non-rehearsed, the listener can interact with the speaker)√Listening to English songs (informal, rehearsed, the listener cannot interact with the speaker)TASK 5Suppose you are teaching a low intermediate class of middle school students. You want to give them some listening practice. The following listening materials are available. Which texts would you choose? In what order? Give your reasons.Key: Answers will vary. Since the tasks associated with these listening texts havenot been specified, we can only consider 2 of the 3 categories that Anderson and Lynch mention; the type of language and the context that the listening occurs in. Some of the factors to consider are:1. If other factors are constant, a live speaker is easier to understand than listening to a tape for two reasons: the sound quality of a live speaker is always better no matter how good the recording equipment is; and students have the opportunity to ask a live speaker questions if they don’t understand.2. A videotape is usually easier to follow than an audiotape since there is visual aid; for example, students can see the facial expressions and gestures of the speaker.3. Familiarity of topic: if the topic is familiar to listeners, it will be easier to understand.4. A lack of context makes the task more difficult, therefore, the live talk by a Chinese psychologist would be easier to understand because it would be easier for the students to predict the content of the talk.Perhaps the students can think of more factors. Grading tasks is a very complex decision because there are so many factors involved and it is very difficult to decide which factors are more important in determining the difficulty level of any given listening text and accompanying task.One possible ordering of these four texts in order of difficulty would be:1. A live talk by a competent English-speaking Chinese psychologist about effective study habits (a live speaker is almost always easier to understand due tothe reasons mentioned above);2. A videotape of a talk by a native speaker about the school life of middle school students in the United States (video tape is almost always easier to follow than audiotapes because of the visual aid; the topic should also be fairly familiar to the students because school life of American students isn’t too different from their own school lives);3. An audiotape of an interview with a native English speaker talking about her experiences living in China (topic should be fairly familiar to them because they are familiar with living in China, although hearing about it from a foreigner’s point of view will be different; disadvantage is because this is on audiotape only);4. An audiotape of the news from CRI (China Radio International--91.5 FM) (probably the most difficult to understand because it is on audiotape, and the topic is out of context as it probably isn’t current news).Another factor to consider is the accent of the speaker. How important is it to expose your students to English spoken by native speakers? It is important to be able to understand English spoken by both natives and non-native speakers, of course, but perhaps with beginning students it is more desirable to expose them to as much native English as possible to help them develop good pronunciation habits.TASK 6Look at the two listening activities below and discuss their differences. Which。