INTEGRATIVE LISTENING LEARNING SKILLS: TECHNOLOGY AND METHODOLOGY

Aliona Solodchuk

(Uman, Ukraine)

Technology plays a massive part in our everyday life. It makes sense that it is incorporated into learning. Technology fascinates us and engages us. Encouraging students to take part is arguably the most important part of any lesson plan, incorporating technology – especially creatively – could be the element that transforms a dull lesson into a captivating one.

As so much of learning comes from practice outside of the classroom, motivating students with innovative ideas is also important. If a student is interested in what is being taught, they are far more likely to seek more information on their own.

For those students who are less familiar with the technology used in the classroom, using it in lessons provides much-needed practice. Technology isn’t set to take a back seat in learning, nor in life in general. So students value the opportunity to familiarise themselves with using different devices in different ways, not just in developing language skills. Opportunities to practice English in a real-life setting are far more readily available. This can be from news sites, through social media, or visit online forums. All of which provide a variety of language use that is difficult to replicate in the classroom. Computers, tablets and e-readers can be instrumental in learning English, offering interactive and motivating activities for students of all ages too. A great way for students to improve their skills is listening comprehension tasks. Students can have question-and-answer sessions, attend video-conferences and virtual field trips, interview professionals, and connect with students from other cultures and countries. Students can listen to podcasts to improve their listening comprehension. There are multiple podcasts tailored specifically for English language learners. Teachers can also have students create podcasts to give them opportunities to practice their speaking skills.

Learning listening has been developed and advanced especially in media and in learning materials used in the cities. There are many choices of listening materials such as CD, video applied in the classroom. However, there are many evidences that listening is lack attention of teachers [2]. When they applied many learning competencies in the classroom, listening skill was always accelerated or reduced. Learning course methodology is discussed and analyzed slightly, and there is a tendency from the teachers that listening is ordinary activity in life. The other factor is a lack of teachers‟ commitment to apply an appropriate approch in listening like using integrative skill which affected listening as an indicator to teach it in haste. Reading and Listening skills were as primary in learning language skill. The relevance of critical listening with learning listening is to prepare the students in order to be the best solver, make the better decision, and long life education. It is important for the students to be independent thinker since there are many jobs needed skillful workers which have critical listening ability. All this time, critical listening ability has not absorbed yet to the students‟ soul so it could not be function maximally in the society. Today, many students are less to apply knowledge gotten from shool to face their daily life problems since they cannot give some prove about some concepts and its connecction to their problems.

  Although, there was an internet that could be accessed by the students as a learning media. That utilization combination media could create the latest listening learning media product. According to Meskill multimedia could improve listening skill focused on [1]:

(a) visual and text roles as a tool to organize language in texts;

(b) video motivation aspect as a profit for language teachning;

(c) media combinations could reach language target to give important input to language acquisition process

(d) suitable environment to describe chart and discourse strategy for the students.

Listening skill refered to some theories such as from Morris, Grene et. al., Logan, Tarigan, Meskill, Richard & Rubin, Sutari, Ginther and Ockey [4]. Morris explained listening process such as hearing, attention, perception, evaluation, and response or reaction.[3] Gren dan Loban described listening process into hearing, understanding, evaluating, and responding. Besides, Logan gave some steps for listening process like comprehension, interpetting, and evaluating. Tarigan and Sutari also suggested that the term of hearing and listening were related element with different meanings in language teaching. Hearing was an activity of process to accept words or sentences accidentally whereas listening was listening activity done by fully attention, comprehension, appreciation, interpretation to get information, to get message, and to understand communicative meaning that have been expressed by the speaker. Moreover, Richard & Rubin said that listening did not oly comprehend the utterances of speakers, but also understood visual aspect in activities of listening comprehension. Based on those explanations, listening was a process included activity of listening sound of language and visual aspect, identify, interprete, value, and do reaction for the content of meaning. This term was used as the fundamental in developmet of active integrative listening learning model. Thompson also desribed active integrative listening learning which could be done into some steps like prepare for listening activity, apply listening model, value listening effectiveness, and implement new goal in listening activity. So, formulated integrative active listening model is based on students center focused on pre- listening, while listening, and post listening activities. Such steps were unity and dynamic in learning integrated with attitude, knowledge, and behavior to achieve listening goal. In pre listening stage, there are some preparations like noticing and reflecting key words; in while listening, the students do listening process by clarifying meaning and performance effectiveness; and in post listening stage, students reflected listening purpose by determining wether listening result accepted or not acepted [1].

Multimedia is a combination between sight and auditory. Learning media is applied interative multimedia. It was called learning media because it was well designed to stimulate thingking, feeling, attention, and will of the students so learning process happened. Besides, learning media is one of dominant aspects after learning method which can improve learning process and achieve high learning result [5, p.2]. Beacause of that, interactive multimedia design was made suitable with learning model development.

References:

1. Arno, Journal of Language Teaching and Research, Vol. 5, No. 1, pp. 63-69, January 2014

2. Field, J., Listening in the Language Classroom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (2009).

3. Morris, Anton C. et. al.. College English. New York: Harcourt Boace & Word, Inc. (1969)

4. Ockey, G.J., “Constuct Implikations of Including Still Image or Video in Computer Based Listening Test”. Language Testing, 24 (4), 517-537. (2007)

5. Sudjana, N. & A. Rivai., Media Pengajaran. Bandung: Sinar Baru Algesindo. [23] Sutari, I. et. al. (1997). Menyimak. Jakarta: Depdikbud. (2007).