Introduction:
The general aim of teaching English as a foreign language in the preparatory stage is to develop the four language skills: listening, speaking, reading and writing in a way that focuses on the development of communication skills (Ministry of Education, 2009). Actually communication development is integrated in the sense that listening, speaking, reading and writing are developed at the same time in relation to each other (Coody & Nelson, 2002).
Communication does not exist without the ability to listen. Acquiring good listening skills allow the listeners to accumulate more information and effectively communicate with others. However, if these skills are not continually practiced, it will slowly diminish (Mulvany, 1998). If students exhibit poor listening, they will lack the ability to recall directions, facts, and details of assignments. Student learning will decrease without the proper level of listening.
Listening provides the learner with comprehensible inputs needed for any education process to occur. The more students understand and interact with what they hear, the better they are able to speak, read and write (Hasan, 2000). Listening is a critical element in the competent language performance of learners, whether they are communicating at school, at work, or in the community (Morley, 2001).
In fact, studies have shown that, even as early as in ‘womb, babies’ exposure to their mothers’ voices has a great influence on the development of their verbal language skills. Childs (2003: p.125), in his discussion of what he calls the ‘attractor theory’, stated the following:
“Typically, language learning begins before birth. For about three months prior to birth, the baby’s ears and neural processes for hearing are already in action. The mother’s voice, her language, and even the stories and songs she read and sang. This prenatal learning gives newborn babies a lifetime advantage at hearing (and of course speaking) their mother’s languages.”
Moreover, fluent speech is a product not of practice in speaking but of participation in receptive activities and reacting to what has been said. Thus listening skills must be given the major emphasis. It is through listening, students acquire vocabulary and syntax, as well as better pronunciation. It is extremely important to develop good listening skills, which, in turn, allow for the better following of directions and communication. Good listening skills are important to teachers who deal with students and to anyone who needs to communicate with peers, subordinates and clients (Mulvany, 1998).
Good listening skills are also a good predictor of future success in school. Students without these listening skills can be at a greater risk of dropping out as well. When a student is not attending to the directions being given, often, s/he has difficulty in completing the assigned task. Unfortunately, the lack of listening skills that leads to inappropriately following directions which in turn has implications at the educational level (Thompson & Gradgenett, 1999).
Listening is used nearly twice as much as speaking and four to five times as much as reading and writing (Fang, 2008). However, teachers of English language spent most of their classroom time trying to teach their students how to read and write. Inside the EFL classes, listening is the skill with the shortest time during class time.
In almost all situations, a foreign language student will be more successful if s/he can utter a simple but grammatically impaired response rather than a complicated and memorized jumble of textbook words. The latter case would clearly show the student had ‘studied well’ but may not necessarily prove there was any real understanding of what had been said. Finocchiaro (2002: p.320) wrote:
“The world, our countries, our communities will survive with faulty pronunciation and less than perfect grammar, but can we be sure they will continue to survive without real communication, without a spirit of community, indeed without real communion among people? Part of the answer lies in the hands of everyone in our profession. Seeking the truth to that answer is a challenge we cannot, we dare not, refuse to accept.”
Throughout preparatory schools, students suffer classes filled with grammar, translations and memory tests. Teachers work in a system which grades students on their ability to memorize thousands of, often useless, words and expressions. English teachers rarely speak to their students in English. Listening texts are often nothing like the real English that students can encounter in daily life situations (Abd El-Salam, 2009). In addition to unmotivated students who refuse to participate in class activities. According to Harmer (2007), uncooperative and unmotivated students are serious problems and can easily disrupt the instructional process.
According to (Fracaro, 2002), after years of listening to the teacher explaining the use of obsolete grammar, suffering through extremely boring reading topics, and regular memory word tests, it is not surprising that the acquisition of English becomes a much disliked chore to all learners.
The development of basic language skills begins with listening. According to Krashen (1985: p.104), comprehensible input is necessary for successful language acquisition. Krashen stated that “The Input Hypothesis claims that humans acquire language in only one way¬¬ by understanding messages, or by receiving comprehensible input”.
Elkeles (2003) assured that listening skills are learned; however they shouldn't be learned haphazardly. Listening is an information processing activity, that is why it needs to be taught through planned programme.
According to Mendelsohn (1994), Lewis (2003) and Zielinski (2008) teachers need to facilitate the development of listening ability through following the following guidelines:
1-Listening should be relevant.
Because learners listen with a purpose and listen to things that interest them, accounting for the goals and experiences of the learners will keep motivation and attention high.
2-Materials should be authentic.
Authenticity should be evident both in language and in task. The language should reflect real discourse, including hesitations, rephrasing, and a variety of accents. Although the language needs to be comprehensible, it does not need to be constantly modified or simplified to make it easier for the level of the listener. Level of difficulty can be controlled by the selection of the task.
3- Opportunities to develop both top-down and bottom-up processing skills should be offered.
Top-down oriented activities encourage the learners to discuss what they already know about a topic, and bottom-up practice activities give confidence in accurate hearing and comprehension of the components of the language (sounds, words, intonation, grammatical structures).
4- The development of listening strategies should be encouraged.
Predicting, asking for clarification, and using non-verbal cues are examples of strategies that increase chances for successful listening.
5- Activities should teach, not test.
Teachers should avoid using activities that tend to focus on memory rather than on the process of listening or that simply give practice rather than help learners develop listening ability. For example, simply having the learners listen to a passage followed by true/false questions might indicate how much the learners remember rather than helping them to develop the skill of determining main ideas and details. Pre- and post-listening task activities would help the learners to focus attention on what to listen for, to assess how accurately they succeeded, and to transfer the listening skill to the world beyond the classroom.
By learning to understand what was being said in a particular situation, people also learn the appropriate way to respond. Reading and writing skills came later. Yet, teachers insist on expecting foreign language learners to acquire a language in reverse. Surely, following the natural way would be better. Therefore, teachers must be creative in seeking methods to develop their students listening skills (Nunan, 1998).
A favorable technique in aiding prep school students to acquire and develop listening skills is the use of dramatic activities. No matter where this technique is applied, dramatic activities may be considered a method of learning, a tool for self-expression, as well as an art. Dramatic activities are defined as school activities in which the students use the language successfully and directively in genuinely meaningful contexts that require listening, speaking, reading and writing (Ibrahim, 1980). According to Halim (2008) the scope of creative and educational drama may be briefly explained through the following six learning principles.
1-A student learns meaningful content through participation in educational dramatic activities better than any other content.
2-Learning occurs as a result of a student’s interaction with his environment.
3-The more sensory organs a student uses while learning, the greater the retention of the lessons.
4-A student learns best by doing and experiencing.
5-Effective participation is important in learning emotional conduct.
6-Learning becomes easier and more permanent in educational environments where there is more than one stimulus.
For the purpose of language teaching, Holden (2001: Pp.2,3) indicated that the aim of using drama inside the classroom is to bridge a gap between the classroom and the outside world;
“They (students) have learnt English in the overprotected world of the classroom, and are unprepared for the ‘coughs and hesitations’ of the outside world. It is up to the teachers to prepare them for this element of the unexpected and, as we shall see, this can often be done through drama. …The teacher can provide situations in which his students can experience the emotions and impulses from which communication develops”.
It is an unignorable fact that creative/educational drama activities have an effect on developing language arts skills, as well as contributing more generally to the education process. In this regard, Maley and Duff (1994) explained some characteristics of drama activities that may be considered advantageous in developing language skills. They assured that drama can help teachers achieve reality in several ways: by making learning the language an enjoyable experience, by setting realistic targets for the students, by creatively slowing down real experiences and by linking the language learning experience with the student's own life experience. Drama can also create a need to learn the language, either through use of creative tension (situations requiring urgent solutions), or by putting more responsibility on the learner, as opposed to the teacher. In addition, drama allows for activity-centered immersion, which can give language learners optimum exposure to a target language (Genesee, 2005).
Dramatic activities are excellent way to get students to use different communicative functions in English, including description, narration, identification, debate, and decision-making. Drama also integrates the four language skills, Therefore using dramatic activities inside EFL classes help students to improve listening skills as they give students opportunity to interact with the text (Millrood, 2001).
Employing dramatic activities make learning an enjoyable experience, make the communicative experience more real and link it with the student's own experience of life (Royka, 2002). Drama also gives a context for listening and meaningful language production, force learners to use their language resources and, thus, enhancing their linguistic abilities (Chauhan, 2004). It means that it forces learners to experience language in operation. In addition, using drama technique is exciting since it employs a multi-sensory approach to language acquisition by involving the participants physically, emotionally and linguistically (Gasparro & Falleta, 2004).
According to Sun (2003), besides fun, employing drama in ESL/EFL classrooms would assist learners develop decoding skills, fluency, vocabulary, syntactic knowledge, discourse knowledge and metacognitive thinking. Moreover, it would increase motivation and reduce anxiety (Reig, 2009). (Peregoy and Boyle, 2008: p.128) claimed that acting out stories and events would motivate learners to process and share information. They add that “Drama activities provide students with a variety of contextualized and scaffold activities that gradually involve more participation and more oral proficiency; they are also non-threatening and a lot of fun”.
Furthermore, integrating drama inside classrooms would facilitate learning (Reig, 2009). Experiencing drama and dramatic activities would expand the language vocabulary of the learners because they not only learn by heart the new encountered words, but also they act them out (Sun, 2003). So dramatic activities would help them acquire this vocabulary easier and faster. In addition, being engaged in dramatic activities would increase the learners' awareness of cultural aspects of the target culture (Gasparro & Falleta, 2004). Moreover, dramatic activities would be used for teaching pronunciation effectively to include stress and intonation (Sasaki & Kono, 2006).
Background of the problem:
Listening is essential in the EFL classrooms for certain reasons. First, without listening comprehension no oral comprehension will take place. Therefore, listening is vital in language classroom. Second, it provides input for learners. Learning could not happen without clear understanding of the input (Nunan, 1998). Listening is the foundation of both formal education and language acquisition (Feyten, 1991). Lee& Hateshol (2003) agreed and added that more than 45% of total communication is listening, speaking takes 30%, reading takes 16%, and writing, 9%.
Teaching listening skills is one of the most important objectives on which teaching language is based. However, based on interviews with supervisors, teachers and students, the researcher found out the following:
1- Listening is not a part of promotional or regional exams, so it is not given the importance it deserves. Teachers focus on teaching students how to read and write while listening finds no attention because it is not used in final exams.
2- Most teachers seem to take listening for granted without exerting efforts to help students develop strategies or techniques to improve it.
3- Listening comprehension exercises do not receive adequate time or effort from both teachers and students. Teachers do not usually teach listening exercises properly.
4- Most of the listening material (like tapes that accompany the ministry books) are either not used at all or not used properly in the classes, and even when teachers play the tapes for their students, they replay them over and over because of the students’ low level of listening, which make the listening comprehension activity meaningless.
5- A great number of students find it more difficult to listen to a taped message than to read the same message on a piece of paper, since the listening passage comes into the ear in the twinkling of an eye, whereas reading material can be read as long as the reader likes.
6- Foreign language learners usually devote more time to reading than to listening, and so lack exposure to different kinds of listening materials.
These findings stimulated the researcher to conduct a pilot study on students of prep stage.
The general aim of teaching English as a foreign language in the preparatory stage is to develop the four language skills: listening, speaking, reading and writing in a way that focuses on the development of communication skills (Ministry of Education, 2009). Actually communication development is integrated in the sense that listening, speaking, reading and writing are developed at the same time in relation to each other (Coody & Nelson, 2002).
Communication does not exist without the ability to listen. Acquiring good listening skills allow the listeners to accumulate more information and effectively communicate with others. However, if these skills are not continually practiced, it will slowly diminish (Mulvany, 1998). If students exhibit poor listening, they will lack the ability to recall directions, facts, and details of assignments. Student learning will decrease without the proper level of listening.
Listening provides the learner with comprehensible inputs needed for any education process to occur. The more students understand and interact with what they hear, the better they are able to speak, read and write (Hasan, 2000). Listening is a critical element in the competent language performance of learners, whether they are communicating at school, at work, or in the community (Morley, 2001).
In fact, studies have shown that, even as early as in ‘womb, babies’ exposure to their mothers’ voices has a great influence on the development of their verbal language skills. Childs (2003: p.125), in his discussion of what he calls the ‘attractor theory’, stated the following:
“Typically, language learning begins before birth. For about three months prior to birth, the baby’s ears and neural processes for hearing are already in action. The mother’s voice, her language, and even the stories and songs she read and sang. This prenatal learning gives newborn babies a lifetime advantage at hearing (and of course speaking) their mother’s languages.”
Moreover, fluent speech is a product not of practice in speaking but of participation in receptive activities and reacting to what has been said. Thus listening skills must be given the major emphasis. It is through listening, students acquire vocabulary and syntax, as well as better pronunciation. It is extremely important to develop good listening skills, which, in turn, allow for the better following of directions and communication. Good listening skills are important to teachers who deal with students and to anyone who needs to communicate with peers, subordinates and clients (Mulvany, 1998).
Good listening skills are also a good predictor of future success in school. Students without these listening skills can be at a greater risk of dropping out as well. When a student is not attending to the directions being given, often, s/he has difficulty in completing the assigned task. Unfortunately, the lack of listening skills that leads to inappropriately following directions which in turn has implications at the educational level (Thompson & Gradgenett, 1999).
Listening is used nearly twice as much as speaking and four to five times as much as reading and writing (Fang, 2008). However, teachers of English language spent most of their classroom time trying to teach their students how to read and write. Inside the EFL classes, listening is the skill with the shortest time during class time.
In almost all situations, a foreign language student will be more successful if s/he can utter a simple but grammatically impaired response rather than a complicated and memorized jumble of textbook words. The latter case would clearly show the student had ‘studied well’ but may not necessarily prove there was any real understanding of what had been said. Finocchiaro (2002: p.320) wrote:
“The world, our countries, our communities will survive with faulty pronunciation and less than perfect grammar, but can we be sure they will continue to survive without real communication, without a spirit of community, indeed without real communion among people? Part of the answer lies in the hands of everyone in our profession. Seeking the truth to that answer is a challenge we cannot, we dare not, refuse to accept.”
Throughout preparatory schools, students suffer classes filled with grammar, translations and memory tests. Teachers work in a system which grades students on their ability to memorize thousands of, often useless, words and expressions. English teachers rarely speak to their students in English. Listening texts are often nothing like the real English that students can encounter in daily life situations (Abd El-Salam, 2009). In addition to unmotivated students who refuse to participate in class activities. According to Harmer (2007), uncooperative and unmotivated students are serious problems and can easily disrupt the instructional process.
According to (Fracaro, 2002), after years of listening to the teacher explaining the use of obsolete grammar, suffering through extremely boring reading topics, and regular memory word tests, it is not surprising that the acquisition of English becomes a much disliked chore to all learners.
The development of basic language skills begins with listening. According to Krashen (1985: p.104), comprehensible input is necessary for successful language acquisition. Krashen stated that “The Input Hypothesis claims that humans acquire language in only one way¬¬ by understanding messages, or by receiving comprehensible input”.
Elkeles (2003) assured that listening skills are learned; however they shouldn't be learned haphazardly. Listening is an information processing activity, that is why it needs to be taught through planned programme.
According to Mendelsohn (1994), Lewis (2003) and Zielinski (2008) teachers need to facilitate the development of listening ability through following the following guidelines:
1-Listening should be relevant.
Because learners listen with a purpose and listen to things that interest them, accounting for the goals and experiences of the learners will keep motivation and attention high.
2-Materials should be authentic.
Authenticity should be evident both in language and in task. The language should reflect real discourse, including hesitations, rephrasing, and a variety of accents. Although the language needs to be comprehensible, it does not need to be constantly modified or simplified to make it easier for the level of the listener. Level of difficulty can be controlled by the selection of the task.
3- Opportunities to develop both top-down and bottom-up processing skills should be offered.
Top-down oriented activities encourage the learners to discuss what they already know about a topic, and bottom-up practice activities give confidence in accurate hearing and comprehension of the components of the language (sounds, words, intonation, grammatical structures).
4- The development of listening strategies should be encouraged.
Predicting, asking for clarification, and using non-verbal cues are examples of strategies that increase chances for successful listening.
5- Activities should teach, not test.
Teachers should avoid using activities that tend to focus on memory rather than on the process of listening or that simply give practice rather than help learners develop listening ability. For example, simply having the learners listen to a passage followed by true/false questions might indicate how much the learners remember rather than helping them to develop the skill of determining main ideas and details. Pre- and post-listening task activities would help the learners to focus attention on what to listen for, to assess how accurately they succeeded, and to transfer the listening skill to the world beyond the classroom.
By learning to understand what was being said in a particular situation, people also learn the appropriate way to respond. Reading and writing skills came later. Yet, teachers insist on expecting foreign language learners to acquire a language in reverse. Surely, following the natural way would be better. Therefore, teachers must be creative in seeking methods to develop their students listening skills (Nunan, 1998).
A favorable technique in aiding prep school students to acquire and develop listening skills is the use of dramatic activities. No matter where this technique is applied, dramatic activities may be considered a method of learning, a tool for self-expression, as well as an art. Dramatic activities are defined as school activities in which the students use the language successfully and directively in genuinely meaningful contexts that require listening, speaking, reading and writing (Ibrahim, 1980). According to Halim (2008) the scope of creative and educational drama may be briefly explained through the following six learning principles.
1-A student learns meaningful content through participation in educational dramatic activities better than any other content.
2-Learning occurs as a result of a student’s interaction with his environment.
3-The more sensory organs a student uses while learning, the greater the retention of the lessons.
4-A student learns best by doing and experiencing.
5-Effective participation is important in learning emotional conduct.
6-Learning becomes easier and more permanent in educational environments where there is more than one stimulus.
For the purpose of language teaching, Holden (2001: Pp.2,3) indicated that the aim of using drama inside the classroom is to bridge a gap between the classroom and the outside world;
“They (students) have learnt English in the overprotected world of the classroom, and are unprepared for the ‘coughs and hesitations’ of the outside world. It is up to the teachers to prepare them for this element of the unexpected and, as we shall see, this can often be done through drama. …The teacher can provide situations in which his students can experience the emotions and impulses from which communication develops”.
It is an unignorable fact that creative/educational drama activities have an effect on developing language arts skills, as well as contributing more generally to the education process. In this regard, Maley and Duff (1994) explained some characteristics of drama activities that may be considered advantageous in developing language skills. They assured that drama can help teachers achieve reality in several ways: by making learning the language an enjoyable experience, by setting realistic targets for the students, by creatively slowing down real experiences and by linking the language learning experience with the student's own life experience. Drama can also create a need to learn the language, either through use of creative tension (situations requiring urgent solutions), or by putting more responsibility on the learner, as opposed to the teacher. In addition, drama allows for activity-centered immersion, which can give language learners optimum exposure to a target language (Genesee, 2005).
Dramatic activities are excellent way to get students to use different communicative functions in English, including description, narration, identification, debate, and decision-making. Drama also integrates the four language skills, Therefore using dramatic activities inside EFL classes help students to improve listening skills as they give students opportunity to interact with the text (Millrood, 2001).
Employing dramatic activities make learning an enjoyable experience, make the communicative experience more real and link it with the student's own experience of life (Royka, 2002). Drama also gives a context for listening and meaningful language production, force learners to use their language resources and, thus, enhancing their linguistic abilities (Chauhan, 2004). It means that it forces learners to experience language in operation. In addition, using drama technique is exciting since it employs a multi-sensory approach to language acquisition by involving the participants physically, emotionally and linguistically (Gasparro & Falleta, 2004).
According to Sun (2003), besides fun, employing drama in ESL/EFL classrooms would assist learners develop decoding skills, fluency, vocabulary, syntactic knowledge, discourse knowledge and metacognitive thinking. Moreover, it would increase motivation and reduce anxiety (Reig, 2009). (Peregoy and Boyle, 2008: p.128) claimed that acting out stories and events would motivate learners to process and share information. They add that “Drama activities provide students with a variety of contextualized and scaffold activities that gradually involve more participation and more oral proficiency; they are also non-threatening and a lot of fun”.
Furthermore, integrating drama inside classrooms would facilitate learning (Reig, 2009). Experiencing drama and dramatic activities would expand the language vocabulary of the learners because they not only learn by heart the new encountered words, but also they act them out (Sun, 2003). So dramatic activities would help them acquire this vocabulary easier and faster. In addition, being engaged in dramatic activities would increase the learners' awareness of cultural aspects of the target culture (Gasparro & Falleta, 2004). Moreover, dramatic activities would be used for teaching pronunciation effectively to include stress and intonation (Sasaki & Kono, 2006).
Background of the problem:
Listening is essential in the EFL classrooms for certain reasons. First, without listening comprehension no oral comprehension will take place. Therefore, listening is vital in language classroom. Second, it provides input for learners. Learning could not happen without clear understanding of the input (Nunan, 1998). Listening is the foundation of both formal education and language acquisition (Feyten, 1991). Lee& Hateshol (2003) agreed and added that more than 45% of total communication is listening, speaking takes 30%, reading takes 16%, and writing, 9%.
Teaching listening skills is one of the most important objectives on which teaching language is based. However, based on interviews with supervisors, teachers and students, the researcher found out the following:
1- Listening is not a part of promotional or regional exams, so it is not given the importance it deserves. Teachers focus on teaching students how to read and write while listening finds no attention because it is not used in final exams.
2- Most teachers seem to take listening for granted without exerting efforts to help students develop strategies or techniques to improve it.
3- Listening comprehension exercises do not receive adequate time or effort from both teachers and students. Teachers do not usually teach listening exercises properly.
4- Most of the listening material (like tapes that accompany the ministry books) are either not used at all or not used properly in the classes, and even when teachers play the tapes for their students, they replay them over and over because of the students’ low level of listening, which make the listening comprehension activity meaningless.
5- A great number of students find it more difficult to listen to a taped message than to read the same message on a piece of paper, since the listening passage comes into the ear in the twinkling of an eye, whereas reading material can be read as long as the reader likes.
6- Foreign language learners usually devote more time to reading than to listening, and so lack exposure to different kinds of listening materials.
These findings stimulated the researcher to conduct a pilot study on students of prep stage.
