Language Skills Assessment (LSA) 1 How I help my C1 students better understand authentic listening material

Introduction
The aim of the present essay is to discuss and analyze how I help C1 level students improve their listening skills to better understand authentic materials, such as the news and TV shows.

Why listening to authentic materials? What sort of authentic?

Listening is one of the four skills (reading, writing, listening, speaking) that are key for language learners to obtain success, and help them understand and, of course, receive information about the language and the world itself (here we can include culture, science, beliefs, and all sorts of human knowledge). However, a constant complaint I receive from students is that they can understand the listening materials of the course book, in the classroom, but struggle to understand native speakers in real situations. By real situation they mainly mean the radio, the lyrics of their favorite songs, TV news, films, and shows. Therefore, it is this concept of authentic material that I will refer to in this essay, which agrees with Nunans definition: A rule of thumb here is any material which has not been specifically produced for the purposes of language teaching (Nunan, 1989:54) as opposed to Morrows view, much broader, which states that an authentic text is a stretch of real language, produced by a real speaker or writer for a real audience and designed to convey a real message of some sort (Morrow, 1977:13). Hence, I can say I decided to focus on listening to authentic material in order to understand it better and help my C1 students overcome their difficulties, mainly the ones related to predicting, extracting details and making inferences.

Scope
This essay will briefly discuss some of the difficulties C1 level students have when listening to authentic material and propose some strategies that can be used to help them predict better, extract more details of the text and make accurate inferences in order to improve their listening skills.

A brief analysis of Listening and learning issues

Listening efficiently
Developing receptive skills is always a challenge, even in L1. Even when native speakers are concerned there is always a considerable struggle to try and understand the messages other human beings are trying to put across. When it comes to listening there is the added problem of decoding sounds, which is always present, regardless of whether it is L1 or L2. Moreover, the human brain became so specialized in this decoding that it actually reads what is not even there. The brain can hear speech content in sounds that have only the remotest resemblance to speech ()Our brains can flip between hearing something as a bleep and hearing it as a word because phonetic perception is like a sixth sense (Pinker, 1994:159). This is what causes natural problems such as slips of the ear (Wilson, 2009:13) so widely explored in the industry of entertainment and so frequently experienced in our own lives. What is more, variations in mood, environment and learning styles will all affect how the learner receives the message. In light of this, it is fair to conclude that in order to develop good listening skills, the learner needs to improve not only their knowledge of the code itself (in our case L2, English), but also have broader knowledge of the world, in order to judge and comprehend context more accurately. This is referred to as schema. Learners make use of their schema when they can relate what they already know about a topic to the facts and ideas exposed in the listening material. That brings us to two different approaches to listening: The top-down and bottom-up models. The top-down model emphasizes using the learners prior knowledge of the world accumulated within their own culture and sociolinguistic background whereas the bottom-up model focuses on specific sounds of a language and how they work to produce meaning, for example the pronunciation of live vs. leave. This latter model looks at phonemes and syllables of words, which are used to create greater chunks of language. It is in the balance of both models that good listening comprehension lies.

The problem with course books

The classes, as well as the material used in class are certainly part of the sources used by students to form/acquire their knowledge not only of the language, but also of the culture(s) where the language is used. That is to say that a good course book would be one that focuses on day-to-day aspects of English-speakers lives, mainly in the USA and UK. However, as Johnson (1989) points out, course books for higher levels tend to focus on world-important events and subjects, as if the fact that the students have achieved a higher level of comprehension and expression in L2 could somehow turn them into historians, or philosophers. This is evidently an advantage if the student is

already an academic, or someone who intends to apply for higher studies in English-speaking countries, but does little to help those in my view the majority seeking to effectively communicate in a non-academic environment.

Personal Experience Link my personal experience teaching C1 students with what was discussed: their interest in authentic material, the approaches top-down/bottom-up. Identify their problems in the sub-skills: predicting, getting the gist, getting specific information, extracting details, making inferences, following topic shifts, taking notes, identifying key-words.

Suggestions for teaching Propose activities focusing mainly predicting, extracting details and making inferences and justify.

Conclusion Wrap-up