Wednesday, November 11, 2009

Listening Difficulties my students face in Grade 10


The Findings of my action research:

After I analyzed the data qualitatively, I came to know that the difficulties my students face varies according to their level. The excellent student face problems in tape recording quality, because sometimes the voice is not clear. His strategy in eliciting general and specific information is to concentrate on the information and try to understand the whole conversation. Another student who represents good students in my class faces difficulties in speed of the tape, because he did not practice listening as much as possible. Therefore, he prefers my reading than the tape. His strategy in eliciting the information from the tape depends on his pre- listening step. He reads the questions very carefully and guesses the answers at first and then focus on the tape. While the average level student faces difficulties in guessing the meaning of new vocabulary from the context and pronunciation. He did not use any kind of strategy to elicit the information from the tape. Finally the weak student, who convinced himself that English Language is so difficult ant there is no way to him to learn it, can not follow up the listening because of his poor English. The reasons behind the difficulties my student in grade ten face in listening tasks are the following:
- Students try to understand every single word in the text.
- Students do not know the meaning of the key words in the context.
- Students do not recognize the word they know because of the way it was pronounced like “red” and “led”.
- Student can not understand the speech without having images. Therefore, they prefer listening to the teacher instead of tape because there is a kind of physical interaction such as body language and facial expression.
- Students can not understand the native speaker because he speaks too fast. Therefore, they prefer teacher’s reading because he usually speaks very slow and clearly.
- Weak students convince themselves that listening to English language is very difficult, which create a mental block. Therefore, it is very important to the teacher to return their confidence back, before building us their skills (Alex, 2008).

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