Вестник Кемеровского государственного университета (Aug 2018)
TEACHING LISTENING COMPREHENSION AT A NON-LINGUISTIC UNIVERSITY: FACILITATION THROUGH INTERNALIZATION OF CONNECTED ENGLISH SPEECH FEATURES
Abstract
Listening is not only one of the most important language skills, which is necessary for everyday communication, but an integral part of foreign language learning. It is evident that the students need an effective training in building auditory skills. However, proper attention is seldom paid to the process of listening to the English speech, altering phoneme recognition in the stream of speech, which often causes difficulties in audio-comprehension. The subject of this research is facilitation of teaching listening comprehension to the students of non-linguistic universities. The purpose of the article is to identify the core phonological features of coherent English speech and provide the examples of activities aimed at their recognition. The methodological framework of the conducted research is represented by bottom-up approach to teaching listening and the tenet that speech perception and comprehension by ear is a process. Therefore, the ability to correctly decode phonemes, words, phrases and infer meaning plays an utmost role. In thiscontext the students’ wrong answers should be analyzed, it contributes to determining the point of misunderstanding. It is shown that making students aware of phonological features of coherent English speech helps them to overcome difficulties in audiotext perception and thus enhances teaching listening comprehension. The results of the research can be of interest to both foreign language teachers and to the researchers dealing with English phonetics learning. Finally, the conclusions are drawn that a successful development of listening skills requires a combination of the bottom-up and top-down approaches. This enables teaching staff to create favorable conditions for acquisition of one of the most challenging language skills.
Keywords