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ACADEMIC LISTENING

Academic listening tasks pose serious challenges to F /SL learners. Even studentsat relatively high proficiency levels are often not proficient for the listening tasks

they encounter in academia (Mason 1995). Students themselves report that whilecomprehending lectures is "a matter of academic survival" (Dunkel 1988), they

feel they lack the skills needed to be effective academic listeners. For an area thatis perceived to be so fundamental by faculty and students alike, academic listening

 problems continue to challenge F/SL students. Some perspective on the complexityof listening successfully in academic contexts offers a starting point in explaining

the challenge academic listening presents to both students and teachers.

2. General Challenges Richards (1983) summarized the basic problems that EFL students encounter in

general conversational listening tasks, all of which would cause problems inacademic settings. Students have trouble processing reduced forms, colloquialisms,

and prosodic features even at higher proficiency levels. Richards further identified

listener difficulties with factors such as speech rate; recognizing redundancies; andlistening through such extraneous variables as hesitations, false starts, pauses, and

corrections all of which are characteristic of spoken discourse. General listening problems, however, are only the beginning for the academic listener. Researchers

also point out that academic listening has features which distinguish it fromgeneral conversational listening and place additional burdensome demands on the

listener (Richards1983; Dunkel 1991; Flower dew 1994).

3. Academic Listening Skills 

Early work by Richards (1983) separated general and academic listening in ataxonomy of microskills. Richards observed that 18 higher-level micro-skills are

necessary in academic listening contexts. He proposed that successful academiclistening comprehension includes the listener's ability to identifY the purpose andscope of lectures, lecture topic and development, relationships between main ideas

and supporting details, and the lexical terms related to topics. He also identified

other academic listening skills such as the ability to recognize markers of cohesionand intonation in lectures, to detect speaker attitude toward subject, to recognizedigressions and non-verbal cues of emphasis, and to recognize instructional/learner 

tasks as opposed to lecture content.

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4. Additional Demands Recently, Flowerdew (1994) identified several skills a student must employ in

order to listen effectively in an academic milieu. These skills include:a. Activating specialized background knowledge

 b. Distinguishing relevant from irrelevant informationc. Negotiating meaning given limited opportunities to interact with the speaker 

d. Concentrating and comprehending for long periods of timec. Integrating the incoming lecture with related information derived from reading

assignments, textbook information, handouts, and OHP or black/white boardlecture notes

e. Taking notesAdd the demands these skills place on the learner to general conversational

listening difficulties and the results often seem insurmountable. Unfortunately,students usually find it difficult to integrate general listening skills with the

higherorder skills characteristic of academic listening. For example,students havetrouble understanding continuous rapid oral language for extended periods of time

with limited opportunities to interact. Additionally, they fmd it difficult to activate

content area vocabulary and schemata and to evaluate what they are listening to sothat they can distinguish relevant from irrelevant information.Even if students are

able to apply general listening skills effectively in an academic setting, they oftencannot take the next step and integrate the more sophisticated skills necessary to

understand anacademic presentation.

5. The Value of Note-taking Reconsidered 

Perhaps the most challenging academic listening demand students face is writingdown the main points of a presentation or lecture quickly and clearly so that they

can be reviewed later. Note-taking poses an awesome challenge to the academiclistener.

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E- Learning

Definition and scope

 E-learning  is commonly referred to the intentional use of networked information

and communications technology in teaching and learning. A number of other termsare also used to describe this mode of teaching and learning. They include online 

learning , virtual learning , distributed learning , network  and webbased   learning .Fundamentally, they all refer to educational processes that utilize information and

communications technology to mediate asynchronous as well as synchronouslearning and teaching activities. On closer scrutiny, however, it will be clear that

these labels refer to slightly different educational processes and as such theycannot be used synonymously with the term e-learning .

The term e-learning comprises a lot more than online learning, virtual learning,distributed learning, networked  or  web-based learning . As the letter “e” in e-

learning stands for the word “electronic”, e-learning would incorporate all

educational activities that are carried out by individuals or groups working onlineor offline, and synchronously or asynchronously via networked or standalone

computers and other electronic devices. These various types or modalities of e-learning activity are represented in Table 1

E-Learning modalities

Individualized self-pacede-learning offline

Individualized self-pacede-learning online

Group-basede-learning synchronously

Group-basede-learning asynchronously

 Individualized self-paced e-learning online refers to situations where an

individual learner is accessing learning resources such as a database or course

content online via an Intranet or the Internet.A typical example of this is a learner studying alone or conducting some research

on the Internet or a local network.

 Individualized self-paced e-learning offline refers to situations where anindividual learner is using learning resources such as a database or a computer-

assisted learning package offline (i.e., while not connected to an Intranet or the

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Internet). An example of this is a learner working alone off a hard drive, a CD or DVD.

Group-based e-learning synchronously refers to situations where groups of 

learners are working together in real time via an Intranet or the Internet. It mayinclude text-based conferencing, and one or two-way audio and videoconferencing.

Examples of this include learners engaged in a real-time chat or an audio-videoconference.

Group-based e-learning asynchronously refers to situations where groups of 

learners are working over an Intranet or the Internet where exchanges among participants occur with a time delay (i.e., not in real time). Typical examples of this

kind of activity include on-line discussions via electronic mailing lists and text- based conferencing within learning managements systems