Tutorial Task 9

This is our discussion about the listening task.

In this activity, students are required to listen and understand a talk. Question (A) is asking about what are the changes that happen to the teenagers and the counsellor’s role in helping students to solve the problems. Question (B) will be about what effects that growing up have on teenagers. Firstly, students will be discussing about the questions based on the audio recording. The question starts with a bottom-up process where students have to listen to the topic in the talk and later on they will have to answer a question about changes that teenagers are facing now, activities that involved in this question are answering and duplicating. First, the listener will listen to the topic and then they will answer the question, other than that they are actually duplicating what is mention by the speaker in the audio. Next, the question which can a counsellor help them to solve those problems actually involved top-down process, students have to discuss the question based on what they know simply saying that they will have to utilize their schemata. We would say that the extending activity involved in the question because they have to think beyond the text by continuing whether talking to a counsellor can help students solve the problems.

Question C need the students to use both top-down and bottom-up processes. To understand what they have to do, first they have to listen the audio recording and recall back a situation where they seek for someone advices and then they will have to relate the experiences to their friends. The audio recording acts as a guide for them to recall what information that they can use in relating the experience to their friends. This guide or scaffolding, become the base of their knowledge and they can get access to it. This is the combination of both top-down and bottom-up processes, often called the hybrid process.

The listening process play a crucial part in this activity because they need to be able to understand the text to be able to answer the questions. To be able to understand this, they need to listen properly to the audio recording. Picking up the major points from a text is the most crucial ability to master and by training them to listen properly, little by little, they would be able to pick up the points from a recording. This contributes to generate meaning from what they heard. With the information they collected, it is now possible to answer the questions by referring back to what they heard and thus comprehension is established.

Reflection

Evaluation Questions:

1)      How it affects me?

I would have to say that listening was never a strong belief of mine. I would always consider eliminating most of the listening tasks and would focus more on writing/reading. But, I just noticed that if there is no listening, the students wouldn’t understand. In other terms, no listening, no learning. I have to consider that listening is the fundamental of learning. In order to learn or in fact imitate, we need to listen to the lesson, instructions or information, now would we? If we cannot listening properly, we cannot learn effectively.

2)      How does it affect my current level of knowledge & how can I use that knowledge to improve myself?

In learning the importance of listening, it would be wise to say that I wouldn’t eliminate the listening tasks from future lessons in my future teaching life. Listening is in fact crucial and by taking into account of the processes of listening, I can see the importance of listening. There are a lot of processes involved in listening, from the cognitive processes (top-down, bottom-up or both processes) to the listening stages themselves. To be able to integrate the effective teaching by involving the listening processes mentioned, it would be possible to teach effective listening skills to students. With their listening skills improving, it wouldn’t be hard for them to succeed in the future.

1)      How it affects me?

I would say that listening is one of the trickiest elements for me to learn but in the end we still have to learn it because we know that for a normal human being without listening you cannot interact to each other.  As I mention before listening is a bit difficult for me and as a future teacher I have to overcome this problem so that I can give my lesson smoothly to my future students.

2)      How does it affect my current level of knowledge & how can I use that knowledge to improve myself?

Listening activity is not just listen and simply answer a yes or no question but it is more than that. In listening activity it triggered our cognitive process which involved bottom-up and top-down processes. Bottom-up is process which is the lower level and it is triggered by the sounds, words, and phrases which listeners hear as they attempt to decode speech and assign meaning. While top-down process is the higher level process that required listeners to utilize schemata or background knowledge and global understanding to derive meaning and interpret the message.

This knowledge will be useful when it is time for me to conduct listening activity in my class in the future.