A New Approach to an Old Problem: Toward an Electric Methodology for Teaching Listening

Over the years, research effort has been devoted to understanding sources of listening problems and how to work them out as effectively as possible; however, no unanimous consensus has been achieved over this issue. Some researchers have focused on declarative knowledge in teaching listening (for example grammar, vocabulary, features of spoken language, and comprehension skills and strategies), while others have emphasized the importance of extensive listening. This study aimed initially to detect major problems of language learners in listening comprehension in a foreign language learning context, and then suggest some practical solutions to these problems. To achieve these ends, first, a listening test including a conversation followed by seven questions was administered to 30 lower-intermediate learners of English. Then, the participants were asked to rank items in a questionnaire containing the main sources of listening problems suggested by other researchers in the field. The results of the study revealed that speaking rate is the most important source of listening problem, and other prosodic features of speech such as assimilation, indistinctness of word boundaries, and connected speech considerably hinder listening comprehension as well. These findings suggest that listening comprehension is too complicated to lend itself to one particular teaching method, either it be strategy-based teaching, subskills instruction, or extensive listening. Instead, teaching listening requires language instructors to adopt an eclectic methodology, incorporating various effective pedagogical activities into language courses in order to help learners recognize unstressed words, words in continuous speech, minimally different words, and unfamiliar pronunciation, as well as encouraging extensive listening programs to develop their fluency.