Focusing Problems in Listening Activities

Now I will do nothing but listen ...
Walt Whitman, Song of Myself

It is not a new phenomenon that teachers comfront different obstackles and problems in teaching a foreign language. Children easily disrupt the classroom in many ways. Some of the common problems are; focusing, complain, chatter, get into fights, and insist on having what they want, when they want it. Being aware of all these problems, a teacher has to focus on the solutions. It is very important that, a teacher has to handle each type of disruption which needs different skills and strategies. This article bases on ‘the focusing problems as well as the strategies in listening activities’.

The Indispensable Role of Learning Languages: Listening

Listening is considered as a key factor in learning languages by numereous scholars, but somehow it is ignored not only in our country but also throught the world. Being one of the learning skills, listening has to apply by teachers with ‘looking’. In broad sense, if the listening activity does not enrich with illustrations, then children cannot understand anything. Thus, children cannot focus on the activity, and when the time passed they will chat with each other, so the teacher will yell at the children: this situation is undesirable for sure. It is clear that, listening and looking are both ‘perceptual skills’. In other words one can be successful in listening-looking activities if he or she understands it. The issue of perceptual skills generally escapes the attention of teachers as they continuously concentrate on teaching process. In this, the perceptual skills plays a great role not only in learning foreign languages, but also our mother tangue. Once an individual has to look back in his or her childhood, without listening any word how can a child learn a mother tangue? As a teacher pays attention on the listening activities through what we see, hear, and say, so children’s word expand will be larger.

Focusing: Is this vey difficult?

Accepting significance of the listening skills, now we will held the problem of ‘why children cannot focus on while they are listening?’. Before mentioning about the solutions one should think about the reason why this problem occurs so often, and also where this problem stemming from. From our point of view, the reason why children cannot concentrate on listening activities are stemming from two diffent perspectives; Children's factor and Teacher's factor.

1. If we look at this problem from a teacher’s perspective;

Children don’t study hard enough
Children forget easily the words what they learned
Children didn’t understand what they learned
Children have no talent for learning languages

2. If we look at this problem from a children’s perspective;

Teacher doesn’t show illustrations
Teacher doesn’t choose interesting subjects
Teacher doesn’t make any pause to describe some unknown words
Teacher doesn’t replay the listening part because listening only once isn’t enough to understand the text easily

There are so many other reasons for this problem, but probably these are most common ones which we face occasionally. Firstly, both the teacher and the students should put aside their prejudices, and then as it is mentioned above, they have to focus on only solutions not problems. Moreover, once the teacher notices that some students easily disrupt the classroom while listening, s/he should utilize following advices besides warning her/his students.

How Can a Teacher Overcome This Problem?

First of all, classes should be prepared with the best appropriate design for ‘listening and looking’ lessons. The voice of the speaker has to be listened by every student.

The second step is helping children to recapture and develop powerful language learning strategies. In this way they can use these handy tips during the lessons and as well as in their life once they have left classes. Especially young learners don’t know how to concentrate on the listening. Most of them even cannot sit normally as they are supposed to. Some of them may prefer walking around the class, and several of them may lay on their desks, a few of them may play with their pencils or sharpeners, or draw some pictures on their books and so on so forth. It is a bitter truth that there may be so little students, who can listen and understand well. Notwithstanding this awful scene the teacher has to draw attention on the text with his or her mimics and body languages.

This is not a good idea that continuously direct learners cliches such as, studying, following the instructions of teachers and course books, analysing grammar, doing exercises on sheets of paper, repetition and drilling, all of them are not arousing the children’s attention and they do not make the lesson interesting as well. As it is stressed earlier listening skill is the most important one among the other skills. So the lessons must be in a playing game shape and very entertaining kind, especially when the learners are very young.

The listening activities must be apropriate to the students level. If the level of the text is higher than that of students than they cannot understand it. If he level of the text is lower than that of students than there will be no interest. As a result, when the time passes it is very normal that learners will hate listening courses. Consequently, the teacher has to be aware of the need to move up or down his or her listening levels.

A teacher sometimes should ask to himself or herself that, are there any students who are moved from being a “bad” listener to a “good” listener? It is not a good idea that asking them to do a few exercises from a book, or teaching them some grammar. ‘Today will be better than yestarday’, this slogan should be always in teacher’s mind.

The listening and looking activities should be so enjoyable that learners focus more, to apply themselves more, not because we have told them to do it, but because they want to and see the need to do it.

The teacher should avoid asking too difficult questions after the listening activity. Furthermore, after every wright answer he or she should encourage the learners with some expressions like, good job, well done, perfect, you are superb and so on in this way there will be more attendance.

If the learners interrupt and need pauses in order to learn the meaning of some new words, then the teacher should persuade them, as it is normal not to know every words. But it doesn’t mean that they should ignore some unknown words. Either they can look up in a dictionary or take notes and after finishing the listening process they can ask the meaning of them the teacher.

Sometimes listening only once isn’t enough to understand the text easily and some certain students whose grade are lower than the average of the class need to listen again. It is very normal but the teacher should be aware of the fact that this repetitions became a pattern. If they want to listen several times it means that they don’t listen very carefully (or the level is higher than that of the students). Thus, the teacher should warn them about s/he won’t replay the listening part in any lesson because they are very careless.

Lastly, the teacher stick on improving his or her teaching, in any case the learners become good listeners. In other words, if the teacher improve his or her listening skills, s/he can bring a new energy to his/her classes.

Conclusion

After researching for this work it is clear that ‘listening and looking’ are two important issues. A teacher has to avoid of teaching vocabulary and grammar frameworks. The listening activities should be short. The teacher make sure that he or she can aware of how much the students understand it. Listeners should answer some questions soon after finishing the audios. There are numerous kind of listening texts available on the Internet. “Do nothing but listen” can be our slogan and this should be hung on the classroom walls.

_{All images taken from Pixabay and thus CC0.}

Refecences

^{- Weiler, A. 2016. How to teach, psychology. The heart of learning languages: Listening. EFL Magazine}
^{- Bernstein, J. 2009. Raising Self-Esteem in Kids with Focusing Problems}