The Impact of Strategy Development on Listening As a Productive Skill in ELT

The Impact of Strategy Development on Listening As a Productive Skill in ELT

The journal, The Impact of Strategy Development on Listening As a Productive Skill in ELT: A Constructivist Approach written by Pinar Kahveci, stressed that listening should not be viewed as a receptive skill but need to be viewed as reciprocal, as listening practices need to be involved frequently in order to know a language. The statement from Tavil (2010) supported the importance of listening by saying listening should be viewed as an interactive approach of learning as the learners construct their own understanding and interpretation of what they heard. This paper is aimed to investigate whether constructivist listening teaching with overt strategy instruction creates any difference in learner’s strategy use of cognitive and metacognitive, reactions to listening tasks, and their listening proficiency.

The research for this paper is conducted with an experimental research design by having EFL Listening Strategies Survey and Questionnaire on Learners’ Reaction to Listening Task as the instruments. The result came out by showing that the constructivist listening teaching has generated positive changes in students’ reaction towards listening classroom, increase learners’ use of cognitive and metacognitive but failed to prove a significant improvement in listening proficiency. The investigation method used by the researcher to collect the data is very sufficient because he worked on pre-test and post-test, which is a test or a survey before and after the treatment of constructivist listening teaching classroom. There were 29 respondents who participated in this research. They will be divided into two groups which are the experimental group and the control group. The researcher will focus on the experimental group and jot down all of the result given by the experimental group.

The researcher worked on the survey which focused on three sections, which are pre, ongoing and post stages of listening activity that included cognitive, metacognitive and socio-affective listening strategies. So, for the approaches and techniques used, constructivist listening teaching is very different from the traditional listening classroom. The difference can be seen by a few methods. Firstly, in a constructivist listening classroom, learners will have a longer pre-listening activity than the usual classroom. By this method, there are many activities can be done with the learners such as encouraging the learners to make inferences of the background of the speakers, ask them more about suspense events in the story to make sure they really gain understanding from what they have heard or the teacher can introduce the grammatical or lexical features that they will learn from the listening exercise. Secondly, in constructivist listening classroom, the teacher is allowed to stop the text and start some discussions. For example, if the students pointed out a question, the question can be discussed before the speaker to continue the story. Discussion of what the learners have heard is important because this can help them to generate more idea and understand more about their learning materials. Lastly, in a constructivist listening learning classroom, listening to material through video is used. The video is mainly related to and familiar with the learners. A constructivist learning classroom resembles real-life learning and encourages learners to build their own ideas based on their knowledge and experience.

I think the approaches and the techniques used by a constructivist listening classroom is very effective to draw learners’ attention towards polishing their listening skill. The teaching method where the teacher can stop the text and ask questions promotes two ways interactions with the students in the class. The approaches used also suitable for a class that has a big size of learners. The teacher can propose questions and the learners can give feedback and lead to a big room discussion. Maybe the text can be played or read more than once as for the second time, the learners will be more focus to gather information from the text. I think, besides understand the text or getting improve in listening proficiency, the teacher also need to stress on the language, grammar and word choices used by the speaker. I believe if the learners are encouraged to detect the feature of the structures of the language use, their listening learning will be more effective. Moreover, the pre-listening activity in the constructivist listening classroom will be much longer than the usual classroom so I think, variety genre of text such as news, narrative, reports and many more should be used to give them practice or an idea before the treatment for constructivist listening classroom begin.

After all, the teachers need to be alert to create a suitable learning environment and execute listening practice so that the learners can control their learning with high self-consciousness (Mitchell & Myles, 1988). Of course, for a listening class, the teacher needs to prepare materials and a quiet classroom for an effective listening learning and teaching classroom. The teacher also needs to control and observe the learning process by making sure that every student takes part in ongoing classroom activity, not only merely listen to the text but also give feedback and reaction to ask questions or seek for clarification. It is very important for learners to be aware of their preferred style or study method so they can learn more effectively.

I think the significance of the study in this paper is to introduce the role of listening skill which is not only a receptive skill but much more than that. Listening is much needed than we thought because before we give any response, we must listen first. From my point of view, the writer is interested in this topic because he found out that listening has failed to be the main point in EFL classroom. Instead, learners are more encouraged to memorize the new vocabularies and apply them in writing. I think listening is prior to learn a language so the writer is trying to raise awareness about the important role of listening in the classroom. The writer also believed by raising the awareness towards the importance of listening skill, learners can manage their learning and learn consciously to achieve effective learning in learning a foreign language. However, the writer failed to make an alignment for the results of the findings in the abstract and conclusion.

From my point of view, I think the approaches for a constructivist classroom are suitable to be replicated in Malaysia’s classroom. As we know, Malaysia’s system in learning English mostly depends on memorizing, not understanding and that is one of the reasons why they do not appreciate a piece of beautiful literature. If a constructivist listening classroom is brought to Malaysia, it can attract learners’ attention as they are going to learn through the videos. This type of learning also can promote learners’ creativity in cognitive since they are going to raise a lot of questions and get into more detail to make inferences and understand the texts. Although to have this kind of effective listening classroom need a lot of time, but as long as the learners learn effectively and learn to earn high potential in listening skill, as a lifelong skill, it is worth enough.

For the conclusion, I think the traditional listening classroom is not as effective as the constructivist listening classroom. The research also has been successful in proving the effectiveness of constructivist listening teaching with overt strategy training. The main point why I support the practice of constructivist listening teaching is because it practiced on the real-life listening classroom. Furthermore, I think if the learners are getting comfortable in receiving input and understand what they heard, they can speak or interact better. Better listening skill will boost learners’ confidence to give feedback on what they heard because they are taking foreign language listening session positively.

References : 

Kahveci, P. (2014). The Impact of Strategy Development on Listening as a Productive Skill in ELT: A Constructivist Approach.

Mitchell, H., & Myles, F. (1988). Second language learning theories. London: Arnold

Tavil, Z. M. ( 2010). Integrating listening and speaking skills to facilitate English language learners’ communicative competence. Procedia Social and Behavioral Sciences.