EL involves
·
listening to (or being involved in)
massive amounts of text
·
text which learners can understand
reasonably smoothly
·
high levels of comprehension
·
listening without being constrained by
pre-set questions or tasks
·
listening at or below one’s comfortable
fluent listening ability
EL is NOT …
·
listening for specific information
·
listening for the exact words of a
phrase or expression
·
listening for details
·
listening to mimic a text
These are
intensive listening exercises aimed at improving specific skills or answering
pre-determined questions.
Why would we do
it?
·
to improve our automaticity in
recognizing spoken text
·
to enjoy the listening (the aim is not
to study the text intensively)
·
to practice the listening skill
·
for knock on effects such as tuning
into pronunciation and noticing intonation patterns
What is Extensive Listening?
Extensive Listening (EL) is a way to improve your listening fluency. But
what is listening fluency? When you learn a language, there are two
things you need to do. First, you need to learn the grammar and the
vocabulary and so on. Most people practice with grammar books and vocabulary
books and by learning for tests by analyzing the words and grammar in detail –
learning their rules and how they work. This method is similar to learning how
a car engine or a radio works. You can take the engine to pieces little by
little, examining it and you can find out how each part (the grammar and
vocabulary) of the engine works by itself. While this is a good thing to do,
it’s not the only thing you need to so. Taking an engine to pieces doesn’t
teach you how to drive the car (use the language). To be a good language user you have to know how to use the language. And that means practice
actually getting on the road and driving the car – actually listening, reading,
writing and speaking English.
The second thing you
need to learn is how the grammar and vocabulary go together to make
communicative messages and how they live and breathe as a living thing. The
best way to do this is to read or listen to language which you understand. If
you understand almost all of the text you listen to, you can build your word
recognition speed, you’ll notice more uses of grammar points, more collocations
and generally your brain will be working very effectively. The listening,
provided it is done at the correct level, will also help improve automatic
processing of language (immediate and fluency processing) which allows your
working memory to concentrate on comprehending what you are listening to.
So, building fluency
means building your listening speed. This means being able to understand almost
everything you are listening to at the level you are listening. A beginner
level student would listen to something with very few unknown words and the
simplest of grammar. An intermediate level listener would choose a listening
text that had a wider range of vocabulary and grammar, but, importantly it is
still quite easy. So the important point here is that ‘difficulty’ is NOT a
property of a text, but of the listener. A given text may be easy for one
person, but the same text may not be easy for another. Therefore one’s ability
level decides whether a given listening text is easy or not.
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