Affective strategy for English listening course

Betty Li · Post by **Betty Li** » Wed May 28, 2008 2:35 am

Hi,
I am a would-be teacher. And recently I am doing a research about affective strategy in teaching English listening. Undoubtedly, listening comprehension is an absolutely necessary and important course in university. But for many college students, listening comprehension is comparatively difficult. They have lots of problems in this part, for instance, low English language proficiency, anxiety, the inappropriate material, etc. So I wonder can affective streategies, such as cultivating their interest, buliding their self-confidence, help them learn this course better? What' s your opinion? Thanks!

Maggie Bai · Post by **Maggie Bai** » Wed May 28, 2008 3:17 am

I think you are right. And I think Affective Strategies would be very helpful in teaching listening. As a language learner myself, I also find it is easy to get nervous when you are doing listening comprehension, especially when listening to news, because it is just so fast and you have little time to response. So I really appericiate that a teacher could apply Affective Strategies to his or her teaching.

woodcutter · Post by **woodcutter** » Wed May 28, 2008 11:59 pm

Exactly. It's fast. You can't go back and hear it again. That's the particular problem with listening, not only in the exam room but in a lot of learning environments too.

And this being the wonderful world of ESL, are we going to talk about how best to address that? (ie how to create contexts where you can get to grips with the material) Nope. We are going to discuss "affective strategies".

fluffyhamster · Post by **fluffyhamster** » Thu May 29, 2008 6:03 pm

I think it's insurmountable, and about the only thing one can do with difficult recordings is transcribe them, then go through the resulting text difficult item by item (i.e. break the context up ever more - what's wrong with "decontextualized" learning? Beats not learning much from "textual" analysis and "comprehension"). One could then play a whole text with a fair amount of the previously studied (and I don't just mean "pretaught") vocab in it, and students shouldn't always be assured that they'd have been able to glean much without much hard work beforehand (I hesitate to say preparation, because the fact is that people rarely anticipate in detail what's in a text prior to encountering it in real life). Just saying 'Don't worry, this is all about X, now just take a deep breath and try to keep listening' just isn't enough.

Another thread on listening strategies:
http://forums.eslcafe.com/teacher/viewtopic.php?t=8474

woodcutter · Post by **woodcutter** » Thu May 29, 2008 11:38 pm

I think fluffy has mentioned the main things - I don't know why the problem should be insurmountable. And if you give support like that, it will naturally build confidence. However, as the other thread says, there is a general tendency to give very long listening exercises, which to my mind undermines confidence.

Most teachers of other languages use the "affective strategy" of going on about how great their language/culture/nation is and trying to enthuse students with it. If the students are enthused then it is helpful for listening and all other skills. However, that option is not really available for us servants of the empire of Darth Bush.