Our curriculum places great emphasis on developing the reading skill. The syllabus is crammed with so many reading lessons to be covered by the end of each term. Students learn different sub skills such as paraphrasing and summarizing, and various reading strategies such self questioning, creating mental images, reading ahead and many more. All these serve our goals of making our students life long and independent learners.
On the other hand, when it comes to developing the listening skill, we can notice its absence in our curriculum. What we do in our classes mainly is TEST listening. In addition, our testing has no inclusion of authentic materials.
Since we aim at helping students reach a point where they can carry out a range of functions that are necessary to deal with others in the target culture, in other words to be able to understand native talk, students must be taught to comprehend what they hear.
Thinking about these points made me curious to find out whether students in our classrooms do understand material they listen to. To test this, I used one of the tapes that we use as a "read along" and which were created for academic use. After students listened to the tape, I was shocked to get this common response from many students "I didn't understand anything."
For this reason, teaching listening should be included in our curriculum. And this teaching should be based on the use of authentic materials. It is essential that students develop both their receptive skills, not only reading.
It's very true that the appropriate listening skill is de-emphasized in our schools and in our curriculum, and that we focus on other skills more than listening. What we have to do is to teach our students how to use their listening skill correctly and how to benefit from this skill. Listening is very important in improving language learning and in strengthening this skill within them to use effectively. As teachers we must not test listening by reading a passage and giving questions, it's about providing students with authentic material that they can benefit from.
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