Comparative Essay

Human beings are born with a series of exceptional faculties which have the common purpose of helping both men and women through their process of development within society, and from the moment we are born, we are taught how to communicate and years later we go to schools in order to fully develop skills such as reading, writing, listening and speaking. In the following essay, we will refer to three different authors: Jeremy Harmer, David Nunan and H. Douglas Brown and their perspectives when it comes to teaching skills, specifically to listening. According to Nunan (2003), listening is an active, purposeful process of making sense to what we hear; it is a receptive skill and it is remarkably relevant when learning to develop speaking skills. The ability to listen, reproduce a language, and the process of teaching listening skills has been studied since recent years, after the World War II, with the audio-lingual method, which required oral responses to be evaluated. Later, researchers realized that listening was an important skill, because learning English it is not just a matter of translating or reading extensive texts, but also understanding the different moods and purposes that a native speaker reflects at the moment of speaking. The current researchers mentioned in the following essay emphasize that, instead of their suggestions and principles, the classroom belongs to the teacher and he is free to create, or even modify activities. However, it is important to remark that the principal aim of teaching listening is to encourage students to respond after receiving the listening text, because listening is a communicative skill.

Listening is fundamental when it comes to the development of the ability to speak; the exposure to a language, in our case English, should vary, in order to face the students to different types of listening; also, teachers should apply a series of principles in order to help the students through their process of developing their listening skills; Harmer, Nunan and H.D. Brown agree on this matter. Listening is absolutely relevant when developing speaking, because, in order to speak fluently, with proper intonation and rhythm, listening becomes a relevant part of our environment, because the ability to speak in a particular way has been directly related to imitation, so when we listen, we tend to imitate words, expressions and different features of speech; this can be reflected, according to the previous authors, in our students attempt to develop dialogues and further production of the pronunciation of the words. Harmer, Nunan and Brown developed a series of very similar principles which can be used as a commandment for English teachers, at the moment to plan a listening activity or a class were listening is required. Our three authors, in their principles, believe that the level of proficiency of the students must be consider when applying a task; authenticity of the language used in listening activities and tasks can help our students to feel familiarized with the contents and context of that particular listening, and it can also be of great motivation for the teacher him/herself when it comes to his/her creativity.

According to Nunan, listening is an active skill differenced in two categories: productive and receptive listening. On the contrary, Harmer states that listening can be divided into intensive and extensive listening, inside the classroom and for pleasure, respectively. From the point of view of the teacher’s role Harmer, on his fourth principle, states that teachers should encourage the students to respond, helping them with an understanding from meaning to form of a listening text. Notwithstanding, Brown says that teachers should be aware in how students respond to the listening activities, being more focused in the form. Nunan suggests the Gouin’s Method, which is based on the use of imperatives and statements that learners can see after they hear, in order to assimilate the action with what they just heard. This recommendation is useful because we listen to for a purpose. Nunan also says that some useful strategies to use in the classroom could be dictation, gist tasks, and the modification of activities, giving a sort of freedom to the teacher. On the other hand, Harmer states that the listening activities are helpful for developing paralinguistic cues, or communicative skills, such as inference of mood of the speakers, find specific information, and achieve a general understanding of the text; thus, teachers should be aware to use different kind of tasks, going from general to specific, in order to encourage students to listen as much as possible, and also to exploit the listening texts with the major quantity of activities possible as well, because the more applications a text have, the more the students learn.

Learning and acquiring skills represents part of the basis of our education, and as future educators it is our aim and duty to deliver strategies, methods and provide techniques, in order to help our future students throughout their learning process. As listening is a communicative skill, should be developed in the better way. Teachers have that task inside the classroom, and for these purposes there are a wide range of strategies and principles, developed by great researchers as David Nunan, Jeremy Harmer and H. Douglas Brown. In this essay, we have faced different definitions and categories of listening, as an active skill more than a passive one, and that can be differenced as intensive or extensive, for academic purposes and for entertainment, respectively. Listening can be categorized as a productive and receptive skill as well, in the right way the learner’s development of the language. We also learned that the different methods bottom-up and top-down can be used in an integrated way, called Interactive Processing, which is based on the activation of background knowledge into the students, in order to engage them through their life experiences, giving them a context before the listening activity; this strategy can be helpful to motivate them and assure a better understanding of the activity and the listening text.

Ma. Francisca Rojas Victoriano

Alexander González