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THE ROLE OF PREDICTION IN LISTENING COMPREHENSION
Yusupova Zarina Anvar qizi
Jizzakh branch of National University of Uzbekistan named after Mirzo Ulugbek
The faculty of Psychology the department of Foreign language:
Philology and teaching language: English. Student of group 103-23
Teshaboyeva Nafisa Zubaydulla qizi
Scientfic advisor
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.14272004
Abstract:
Listening comprehension is very essential for English learners. Good listening
comprehension helps learners to improve comprehensive language proficiency, and promotes
the effective implementation of foreign language teaching. However, it is an important and
difficult point for foreign language learners. Students cannot understand the listening
materials in listening exercises, and they face difficulties in completing the listening exercises
assigned by the teacher. This can lead to anxiety and stress for learners which can probably
result in lack of interest in learning English. Therefore, the language teaching researchers
focus on effective teaching in English listening classes. Recent studies have shown that the
learning strategies are helpful for learners to master relevant learning content, and learners
can use some listening learning strategies to help them better understand listening content.
1. Introduction
Listening is not only the foundation and source of motivation for language learning but
also a prerequisite for expressive functions. According to statistics, the proportions of
language use in the four aspects of people’s daily social life are: writing accounted for 9%,
reading accounted for 16%, speaking accounted for 30%, and listening accounted for 45%. It
can be seen that listening plays a dominant role in language learning. In today’s increasingly
frequent international exchanges, English, as a communication tool, is constantly being valued
by people. And, high school English teaching is an important stage of cultivating students’
foreign language quality, so listening teaching plays a vital role in high school English
teaching.
The curriculum goals stipulated by the general high school English curriculum standards
are based on compulsory education at levels one to five, and there are four levels (levels six to
ninth) of target requirements, of which the seventh level is required by high school students.
The seventh level of the curriculum standard requires students’ English listening ability to be
able to identify key information in speech materials and make simple predictions of
conversational content, and to understand the content of familiar topics and some operational
instructions. It can be seen from this that the listening ability required by the curriculum
standard is specific and clear, and how to effectively achieve this teaching goal is an urgent
problem to be solved. However, for the vast majority of high school students, English listening
comprehension is difficult, which is far from the listening ability requirements of the
curriculum standard. There are data showing that students feel that they have difficulty in
English listening, and have a negative attitude towards English listening. They generally lack
learning interest and self-confidence in English listening, and even feel afraid of English
listening. Although students spend a lot of energy and time on daily listening practice, they are
always worried that they will not be able to hear it, they will not be able to understand the
content of the material correctly, and their listening ability will not be improved as they
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should. Teachers are also looking for various ways to improve students’ English listening
ability .
Predictive strategies are widely used in all aspects of language skills learning and
research, including listening teaching. Therefore, the main point of this article is the influence
of predictive strategies on high school English listening teaching. The concept of prediction
can be simply interpreted as prediction in advance. Prediction strategy is essentially a
strategy of using reasoning. The learner first browses the topics and clues related to the
listening materials, and then uses the original knowledge to process the newly acquired
information, and finally gets the knowledge related to the listening materials. Predictive
strategies can help language learners prepare the background of the language materials they
will hear and assist listening comprehension. Research shows that predictive strategies can be
applied to prelistening or during listening. Before the listening play, learners can see if there
are pictures or titles related to the topic around the practice questions to be completed, or
read the practice questions and the answer options given. In this way, the learner can infer
the main content of the listening exercise in advance. In the listening process, learners
understand the above content while deriving the following content. In the process of
derivation, the listener can use information such as the speaker’s intonation to create a
situation in which the speaker communicates in his or her brain. When listening
comprehension occurs, the predictive ability of the listener is greatly related to the listening
comprehension of the listener. Many researchers generally believe that learners with strong
predictive ability are generally more confident in the process of language learning. Then, his
or her understanding of listening materials must be more comprehensive .
Therefore, the training of prediction strategies conforms to the learning rules of
language learners. Moreover, as a part of cognitive strategies, predictive strategies have been
incorporated into the curriculum standards, which also meets the actual requirements of
English teaching under the current education model. This work used data mining strategies
for exploring the impact of prediction strategies on English listening learning, and proposed
relevant training methods to improve students’ listening prediction ability. The systematic
experiment proved the validity and correctness of the method designed in this work. In the
following paper, we have arranged the paper in such a way that Section presents a
comprehensive literature review and related works. In Section , we have defined several
methods and techniques for the learning processes of a foreign language. In Section , we have
deeply analyzed the achieved results of the experiments. A broad discussion has been carried
out. Finally in Section , we wrote the conclusions of our study.
2. Related Work
They are: cognitive strategies, metacognitive strategies, and social and emotional
strategies. Among them, the research results on the role of metacognitive strategies in foreign
language listening learning are the most abundant. Reference proposes that metacognitive
learning strategies are helpful for improving foreign language learners’ listening ability, and
believes that comprehension testing is superior to other metacognitive strategies, such as
inference, selective attention, and in-depth discussion. Reference found in the research that
students who can effectively combine cognitive strategies and metacognitive strategies have
better listening performance. Reference research shows that students’ listening
comprehension ability is greatly improved after using listening materials with videos in class.
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Although computer-assisted multimedia teaching brings flexible and individual learning
methods and abundant listening resources to listening teaching, it also adds a lot of fun to
learning. However, there is still much controversy in foreign countries on whether human-
computer communication can replace people’s face-to-face communication in real life.
Reference pointed out that computer multimedia technology itself is not omnipotent. In order
to improve the listening level of learners, computer multimedia technology must be based on
the theory of second language acquisition and second language listening in teaching.
Reference proves that narrow listening teaching is helpful to stimulate students’ interest in
learning and improve listening skills. Reference found that academic listening can also
promote the improvement of students’ listening skills. Reference affirmed the positive role of
interactive listening teaching method in the second language listening class. Although the
interactive listening teaching method has attracted the attention of many researchers, there is
still no successful interactive listening teaching model in the academic world .
Reference based on the theory of cognitive strategies, with the purpose of improving
the effectiveness of college English listening teaching, conducted a one-semester cognitive
strategy training teaching experiment on college students. After the experiment, it was found
that 7 of the 11 training strategies were found to have a significant positive correlation with
listening performance, just like the total cognitive strategy. This means that the training of
listening cognitive strategies in college listening teaching is an effective listening teaching
model. Reference is a study on College English Listening Teaching under the guidance of
cognitive strategy theory. The research believes that teachers pay attention to the training of
students’ listening cognitive strategies in the teaching process, which can help students’
learning. At the same time, when answering questions in actual listening, the teacher
demonstrates to students how to use cognitive strategies of listening to solve the three stages
of listening problems before listening, during listening, and after listening. This also has a
certain effect on improving student learning efficiency. Reference studied the barriers of
Chinese students’ listening notes through tests, interviews, and questionaires through the
strategic research of Chinese students’ English listening records. Through the analysis and
comparison of data, it is concluded that the obstacles of English learners’ listening recording
mainly focus on the speed of listening materials, the vocabulary involved, and recording skills.
Reference focuses on training students’ listening strategies while listening and remembering
for the dictation part of the English major–level eight exam. When listening to the recording,
briefly record the important information on draft paper. After listening, you can organize and
recall the listening content through the recorded information. The average score of students’
dictation scores has been improved through many targeted trainings. Reference explores how
listening prediction strategies can activate students’ long-term memory and help students’
listening comprehension. The foreign language students in the university’s elementary classes
are the research objects, and one of the classes is the experimental group and the other is the
control group to conduct quasi-experimental research. Students in the experimental group
will receive the teaching of listening prediction strategies. The implementation stages of this
listening strategy include pre-listening and post-listening processes. Experimental research
results show that listening prediction strategies can help students activate long-term memory
to a certain extent, and predict listening content based on topics and background knowledge
before listening. In the listening process, use context to jump obstacles to achieve a smooth
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understanding. Reference is to explore whether prediction strategy training can mobilize the
listener’s learning interest and improve their listening level. Taking college non-English
majors randomly formed into two first-year students in natural classes as the research object,
the researcher adopts the traditional listening teaching mode in the control class. The results
show the feasibility and effectiveness of genre-based prediction strategies in the teaching and
learning of English listening.
3. Method
Based on previous research results and findings, combined with the school’s own
teaching conditions and specific academic conditions, this article puts forward the content
and methods for the effective implementation of predictive strategies in high school English
listening classes, and introduces specific research plans in detail. The purpose, objects,
problems, methods, tools, and processes of the research are shown one by one. It is hoped
that practical research will prove that the teaching of predictive strategies is feasible and
effective in improving students’ listening comprehension
Purpose
This study investigates the use of predictive strategies by students with high and low
scores in English listening to discover the relationship between predictive strategies and
listening performance. And, in accordance with the requirements of high school English
curriculum standards for students’ strategic learning, a predictive strategy training program
for high school students is proposed, and the teaching of predictive strategies is integrated
into the teaching of English listening. And, through the comparison of the class performance of
strategy teaching or not, the influence of the use of predictive strategies on students’ English
listening performance is analyzed. The purpose was to explore ways to efficiently improve
students’ English listening performance and try to put forward feasible and effective teaching
suggestions for high school listening teaching, so as to help teachers fully realize the positive
effect of strategy teaching on students’ listening comprehension, and play a role in promoting
the teaching of predictive strategies into the classroom.
Objective
The subject of this research was the students from the first grade to the second grade in
a senior middle school. Two classes are selected for each grade. The overall English scores of
each class in the same grade are not significantly different. However, the focus of this research
was on the impact of predictive strategies on the listening performance of English learners.
Therefore, before the start of the experiment, the two classes of the same grade who
participated in this study were subjected to a pre-listening test in order to compare whether
the listening levels of the two classes are equivalent. The results of the previous test show that
the listening levels of the two classes are almost the same, which means that two different
classes of the same grade can be used as the experimental group and the control group in this
study.
Instructing students how to predict is mainly to teach students how to obtain prediction
clues. The common methods of obtaining clues are: Obtain prediction clues from the
situation, including getting clues from the occasion of speaking, the characteristics of the
speaker, the expression and behavior of the speaker when speaking. Obtain clues from text
materials such as questions, question stems, and options in listening exercises and tests.
Obtain key words about the topic from the discourse as clues. Once the topic is determined
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from the keywords, the related schema will be activated. Use topic sentences as clues. The
topic sentence in a discourse contains the information of the entire discourse, through which
the general content and structure of the following discourse can be predicted. Use function
words or textual markers as clues. Function words or text signs convey the structural
information of the discourse content and the mental state of the speaker, and can express
transitions, concessions, instructions, generalizations, summaries, logical sequences,
conditions, and causal relationships. These function words have a guiding effect on the
listener’s understanding, and the listener can predict the content and text structure of the
following text accordingly. Use the former part of idioms and fixed collocations as clues to
predict the latter part. Use the tone of the speaker as a clue. The tone of speech is subtle,
conveying the speaker’s mental state, and foreign language listeners must be trained to form
the corresponding experience schema. Tone in English is mainly reflected by stress and
intonation. When they change, it means that the speaker’s mental state has changed, and the
listener can predict the following based on this. Integrate the discourse before and after, build
a larger context, and form larger clues, such as the development of the story above, the
causality of events.
Methods to train students to implement prediction and promote ability transfer: Carry
out pre-listening prediction training to cultivate the habit of pre-listening prediction. Let
students maintain predictive awareness in listening training. Train students to think both
vocally and silently in English. Train students’ association ability. Pause at the key points of
idioms and fixed collocations, let students predict the following, and then play the following.
Pause at the key point of the discourse; let the students choose from the options… An
appropriate following, and then play the following. Let students listen to the preceding text,
and then guess the possible continuation, allowing students to have different guesses. Make
some longer pauses in the listening materials, and let the students say what follows. When
listening to the essay, stop after the topic sentence and let the students predict. From the
sound forecast to the silent forecast development. From a pause to a nonstop development.
Provide materials, clarify the requirements, and allow students to operate after class to make
up for the lack of class time and ensure the predicted amount of practice. Combine the
training of predictive skills with usual listening training.
Method and Tool
The research methods used in this work are the questionnaire survey method and the
teaching experiment method. The questionnaire survey method is to understand students’
cognition and application of predictive strategies by distributing questionnaires to the
research subjects and asking them to fill in the questionnaires. And, use the corresponding
data statistical tools to conduct data mining, analyze the difference between high and low
score students’ cognition and application of predictive strategies, to answer the first research
question. The effective implementation of this method is based on the known students’
prelistening test scores. In this process, the teacher needs to make a one-to-one
correspondence between the student’s pretest scores and the results of the questionnaire, and
perform relevant data analysis on the known statistical results.
The teaching experiment method is the main method used in this research. By definition,
the teaching experiment method requires teachers or teaching researchers to base on certain
teaching theoretical hypotheses. Combining relevant methods and strategies, explore reform
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measures to adapt to current academic conditions or draw some inferences related to
educational practice. Therefore, this research first puts forward a hypothesis. Secondly, select
the research objects according to the needs of the experiment, and randomly determine the
experimental group and the control group. Then, before the start of the experiment, all
students participating in the experiment will be tested for listening.
The questionnaire of this research draws on Reference designed to investigate the
relationship between the use of predictive strategies of junior high school students and the
use of predictive strategies. The questionnaire developed for this work contains 10 questions.
The reasons for choosing these 10 questions are as follows. In the previous literature review,
the previous research on the application of predictive strategies in listening teaching was
shown. The research results show that the prediction strategy can be applied before and
during listening play. In addition, combined with the listening comprehension survey
requirements of high school students, it is believed that these 10 questions can reflect the
prediction strategies that high school students can encounter and use in the process of
listening practice. These ten questions can be roughly divided into three categories. The
purpose of the first type of questions is to understand the high school students’ cognition of
predictive strategies and their own psychological cognition during listening practice. The
second type of question is about the investigation of students’ use of prediction strategies
before listening. The third type of question is about the use of predictive strategies by
students during the listening process. The five-level scale constructs the basic framework for
the design of this questionnaire. After students have read each question, they can choose from
5 levels of answers according to their own situation.
Conclusion
The method of predictive skill training includes three aspects. The first is a method that
encourages students to form predictive conditions. The second is to instruct students how to
predict methods or strategies. The third is to train students to implement predictions and
promote the transfer of abilities. The traditional methods mainly teach students the methods
or strategies for obtaining predictions. They do not pay attention to the conditions of
prediction and ignore the transfer of students’ abilities. Information of skills, as well as the
conditions of the students, in order to achieve the set goals, this work proposes the following
methods as hypotheses.
References:
1.
Teshaboyeva Nafisa Zubaydullayevna “ Teaching vocabulary in ELS classroom”
2.
Anne Anderson and Tony Lynch (1988). Listening. Oxford University Press
3.
Jack Richards, Designing instructional materials for teaching listening comprehension, in
‘The Language Teaching Matrix’, Cambridge, 1990
4.
Mary Underwood (1989). Teaching Listening. Longman
5.
Penny Ur (1984), Teaching Listening Comprehension, Cambridge
6.
Magnus Wilson. Discovery Listening – improving perceptual processing. ELT Journal
Volume 57/4 (October 2003)
