Муниципальное автономное образовательное учреждение

          Домодедовская средняя общеобразовательная школа №6

                   Research work

           «Listening and comprehension in children opinion»

                                                                                   Completed by Sergina Mary,

                                                                            Form 10

        Edited by E. A. Strukova,

                                                                            Teacher of English

                                                Domodedovo

                                                       2017

                                                     Content

Introduction        3

Chapter 1. Features of English listening comprehension        5

1.1What is listening comprehension?        5

1.2Types of listening comprehension        5

1.3 Classification of English sounds        6

1.4Difficulties of listening comprehension teaching and ways to remove them        7

Chapter 2. Practical part. Identification of difficulties in listening comprehension  learning in primary school        8

2.1 Students survey and its results        8

2.2 The experiments and their results        11

Conclusion        14

Bibliography        15

Appendix        16

 Introduction

A few years ago, when I was in the second form, I found myself in a difficult situation. I was at school, the bell rang for a lesson. An unknown teacher came and told us something. I did not understand. Classmates got up, and so did I. She said again strange phrases, and we sat down. It turned out that she was an English teacher. So I started to learn English. It was very difficult for me, because I did not understand much, especially when we had listening comprehension. I was even afraid of that word. I had to do a lot of work to begin to understand the teacher and do the task properly. In the future I want to become an English teacher.

Actuality of the work is that it is often difficult for children to learn English because of the difficulty in hearing. Phonetics plays an important role in its study. At school, the first English lesson starts with sounds strange for children, a new speech that they will have to learn to use. And the attitude to this language, the desire to speak English or its absence, and sometimes the possible appearance of fear, depend on how competently the teacher`s qualifications.

The purpose of this research is to create a presentation illustrating the difficulties that prevent children of primary school to understand oral English speech, and ways that reduce their impact on its understanding.

The novelty of the work is that we report our schoolchildren`s opinion about listening comprehension and its difficulties.

The practical importance is to take into consideration the wishes of children, as well as the results of experiments in my future profession.

Tasks:

• To study the features of listening comprehension, its purposes in primary school;

• To consider the classification of English sounds;

• To identify difficulties;

• To consider ways of removing the difficulties and to find out the optimal ones;

• To make up an experiment on the material used in the listening lessons in primary school;

• To conclude what difficulties students have and how to reduce their impact on oral speech understanding.

Object of the research: difficulties of listening comprehension.

The subject of the research: the difficulties of listening comprehension in our primary school.

Research hypothesis: if we identify the difficulties that, according to our school`s children opinion, pretend to understand oral English speech, we will be able to find the optimal ways to reduce the degree of their influence on understanding.

Comparative and experimental methods helped us to conduct the practical part and prove the hypothesis.

Chapter 1. Features of English listening comprehension

1.1What is listening comprehension?

Listening comprehension is the ability to distinguish and understand what others are saying, it is the understanding of a foreign speech at lessons.

It means an understanding of the speaker's emphasis, grammatical structures and vocabulary, which the speaker has.

We face with listening in various situations of real communication. This happens when we listen to:

• Various  information;
• News on radio and television;
• Lectures;
• Stories;
• Speech on the phone, etc.

And children in primary school do it every lesson.

The reasons of learning English listening comprehension in primary school:

1) To teach students to understand the meaning of a single statement;

2) To teach to highlight the main thing in the flow of information;

3) teach students to recognize individual speech patterns and word combinations in the flow of speech;

4) To develop auditory memory of students;

5) To develop an auditory response.

1.2Types of listening comprehension

Bim writes, "Three types of listening comprehension can be distinguished:

- With full understanding;

- With understanding of the main content;

- With selective understanding ".

The first one is a complete understanding of all the information contained in the text. Therefore, this kind of listening is the most difficult, as it requires a high concentration of attention.

The second one is a processing of the semantic information of the sounding text in order to separate the new from the known, essential from the nonessential, to fix the most important information in memory.

The purpose of the last one is to pick out in the speech stream the necessary or interesting information, ignoring unnecessary. It can be such information as important arguments, details, keywords, examples or specific data: dates, numbers, proper names and geographical names.

1.3 Classification of English sounds

Phonetics plays an important role in its study. We know there are 26 letters in English alphabet. And in different combinations and positions they designate 44 sounds. There are two major classes of sounds traditionally distinguished in any language - consonants and vowels. There are two major classes of sounds traditionally distinguished in any language - consonants and vowels.  We found out that the consonant sounds are classified according to the type of obstructions that air meets in its path when we pronounce these sounds. Depending on the obstacles, sounds can be either abrupt or explosive, slit, labial-labial and interdental.

Depending on the vocal chords consonants are divided into voiceless and voiced.

 Russian phoneticians suggest a classification of vowels according to the following principles: 1) stability of articulation; 2) tongue position; 3) lip position; 4) character of the vowel end; 5) length; 6) tenseness.

1.4Difficulties of listening comprehension teaching and ways to remove them

Learning listening comprehension children have to face some difficulties. They are divided into phonetic, grammatical, lexical.

1. Phonetic difficulties mean the individual manner of speech.

In order to understand the speech of native speakers, it is necessary to listen to their speech already from the beginning of the learning.

2. Grammatical difficulties mean that listening to a phrase, the learner should divide it into separate elements.

3. Lexical implies the presence of many unfamiliar words, which students indicate as the reason of misunderstanding the text.

At the same time, we should not forget that younger schoolchildren like to play different games, watch cartoons, programmes about animals, read favourite fairy tales, sing songs and so on. There are different ways of removing difficulties, at the same time motivating, interested and even intriguing pupils to learn the language. We think that one of the most optimal ways to remove difficulties is visualization. And in our research we used the so-called combination of enjoyable and useful,  we used favourite children's cartoons and fairy tales, translated from Russian into English.

So, listening comprehension is a new kind of activities for schoolchildren in primary school. They love new things and can get carried away by it with a positive result, but lose interest quickly if something does not work out. Difficulties determined by methodologists and educators can become serious obstacles in achieving the purposes of listening comprehension. The individual characteristics of a number of students, as well as the state of health, can also become additional obstacles in teaching listening.

Chapter 2. Practical part. Identification of difficulties in listening comprehension  learning in primary school

2.1 Students survey and its results

During the research, we worked with pupils of two third-classes children because they have already known what listening comprehension is, as a kind of activity and they are the middle link of pupils, learning English, in the primary school.

In the practical work, the survey and experiment became the leading ones. 43 people (72%) of students from the third classes took part in the survey.

During the survey, we found out which of them like listening comprehension. All of them raised their hands, but not immediately. Those who raised their hands later said that they liked to listen, but did not like to perform tasks, because they did not always understand what they had heard.

After that, we found out what prevent them from understanding the speech. (Annex 1.1)

What do you like to listen to most of all?

Who is more preferred to listen to?

Pupils answered the questions with interest and seriously. From this survey, we can conclude that the perception of information really hinders the speaker's speed of speech and extraneous noise can make an oral English speech difficult to understand. Besides, the sex and age of the speaker influence an oral English speech perception and degree of understanding.

2.2 The experiments and their results

After interviewing the students, and having examined the ways to remove difficulties of listening comprehension learning, we conducted an experiment. We divided all the pupils into two groups. Pupils of the both groups are of the same age and have the same level of preparation. One group did the exercise for listening comprehension from textbook "Enjoy English 3" by Biboletova (Appendix 2, exercise 1). We took the textbook by this author because we used it earlier in our studying of English language and we like it. The children listened to the text about the bear and did the exercise after it (Appendix 2, exercise 2). At the pre-text stage, we recalled the vocabulary from the topic "Food", than listened to the text and at the post-text stage, the children were asked to fill in the gaps. The task was completed successfully.

The other group was offered to watch "The Bun" in English with English subtitles. At the pre-text stage, we also remembered the vocabulary and got acquainted the new one. After listening the pupils answered the questions using the vocabulary from the tale and retelled it using the vocabulary and the pictures that we had given them. (Appendix 3)

The results of the experiment with the first group.

The results of the experiment with the second group.

The students were so carried away by their work, especially during the second experiment, that they did not pay attention to the difficulties og listening comprehension. Each of them wanted to answer, and they were not afraid of making mistakes.

Conclusion

So, the purpose of this research was to create a presentation illustrating the difficulties that prevent children of primary school to understand oral English speech, and ways that reduce their impact on its understanding. To achieve the purpose, we studied the features of listening, the reasons of its learning in primary school, considered the classification of English sounds, the survey helped us to determine the difficulties that prevent listening comprehension learning in primary school. Among a variety of techniques and  ways of relieving difficulties refusing, we isolated the visualization as more suitable and conducted experiments. For one of the experiments we took the well-known Russian fairy tale translated into English, because we believe that the well-known content of the fairy tale can help to get acquainted with the new vocabulary, make it easier to use in your speech, and can motivate pupils and make them be interested in learning language. We think that on the basis of the information we have studied, as well as the results of the research conducted, we can make conclusion that difficulties that prevent learning listening comprehension can become insignificant and even imperceptible. The experiment showed that the difficulties voiced by children lose their significance if the task is suitable and one can see it in the diagrams of our presentation. So we achieved the purpose. And we can say that our hypothesis has been confirmed.

                                         Bibliography

Теория и практика обучения иностранным языкам: традиции и ин-новации: Сборник статей международной научно-практической конфе-ренции памяти академика РАО Инессы Львовны Бим.– М.: ТЕЗАУРУС, 2013. – с.

Used resources:

http://po-anglijski.electrichelp.ru/zvuki-i-bukvy/

http://englishdaily.3dn.ru/publ/proiznoshenie/klassifikacija_anglijskikh_zvukov/klassifikacija_anglijskikh_zvukov/174-1-0-147

http://festival.1september.ru/articles/584680/

https://infourok.ru/statya-po-temeaudirovanie-kak-vid-rechevoy-deyatelnosti-707568.html

https://www.infouroki.net/statya-audirovanie-po-inostrannomu-yazyku-v-nachalnyh-klassah.html

Appendix

Appendix 1

1.1 What pretend to understand English oral speech? 
Students' answers – А) Speed of speech; B) Extra noise; C) Indefinite speech.

1.2 What do you like to listen to most of all?

The most popular answers were – А) Songs; B) Poems; C) Oral messages; D) Dialogues.        

1.3 Who is more preferred to listen to?

Answers – А) Children`s speech; B) The speech of men; C) Women`s speech; D) Any speech.

Appendix 2

Appendix 3