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12.1.1.5.3. What makes classroom listening difficult?

There are some factors which make classroom listening morę difficult for students:

—    bad ąuality of sound / recording, s no feedback,

—    no visual clues,

—    teacher may evaluate listenerś’ success,

—    faults of teaching: teacher may confuse listening texts with presentation texts:

a)    listening texts are used to practise listening; listeners can discard redundant information and decide what is important, make guesses when they are not 100% surę what has been said this way trying to make out sense; listening texts may be:

authentic - not prepared for learning,

realistic - may be read by actors or written by textbook authors, but they are not designed to teach vocabulary or grammar.

b)    presentation texts resorted to when teacher is in need of presenting new structures, functions, vocabulary; they need to be understood so they are often simplified, written especially for teaching. Confusing these two types of texts leads to forming bad habits; teachers encourage learners to pay equal attention to all details in the text.

12.1.2. Factors affecting listening comprehension

There are several factors affecting listening comprehension:

—    text factor - level,

—    task factor - can students do the task?,

S- leamer factors,

—    extemal factors - weather, time of day, noise, etc.

12.1.2.1. Text factors

Authentic, realistic texts are morę difficult but necessary to listen to in order to recognise and become familiar with different

accents, recognise redundancy; it is the task that makes the text

difficult;

The following are the features that increase text difficulty (based

onNunan: 1991):

—    the organisation of information - matching or nor chronological order of events,

—    the familiarity of the topie,

—    the explicitness (talking about the topie one thing at the time) and sufficiency (enough information) of the

—    information,

—    the type of referring expressions used - the use of pronouns instead of complete noun phrase referents makes texts morę difficult to follow,

—    when the text describes static relationships (e.g. geometrie figures, position of fumiture in the room) rather than dynamie relationships - change (e.g. a road accident, etc.),

—    speed - if too fast it is confusing,

-— amount of Iow freąuency (rarely used) vocabulary,

—    clarity of discourse structure - if you hear ‘ As Fve said before’ -information is going to be repeated; ‘For example’ - you are going to be given an example,

—    contextual support - pictures, video,

—    genre - register - type of language, e.g. legał, business, etc.

12.1.2.2. Task factors

Task factors can compensate for text difficulty; among them one can list:

organisation - if the events are not in chronological order teachers should give students the list of events and students are to put numbers or arrange events in the order they happen,

—    familiarity - pre-listening activities should be set to familiarise students with the topie,

—    explicitness and sufficiency - teachers should make information clearer by using pictures, explanations, adding information for sufficiency,

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