Why listening is a powerful skill in language learning !!

The Power of Listening Ability: Developing Listening in English Through Podcast

Language is system of arbitrary vocal symbols which permit all people in a given to other people, who have learned the system of the culture, to communicate or to interact. the people in the world, one of them is English. English is an important language because it is spoken by people in the world, as a first language, second language, or foreign language.

They speak and learn English to communicate with another person and achieve their purposes. English is one of international language which used by many countries. As the foreign language, English is considered difficult to learn by student because English is new for them. They have been surrounded by their mother tongue and spoken in their native language since their childhood. As a foreign language, English has four skills to be mastered by students, they are listening, speaking, writing and reading. Listening should have an important place in teaching learning English because it is impossible for the people to speak without listening first.

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Podcast as Language Learning Materials

states that teaching is showing or helping someone to learn how to do something, giving instructions, guiding in the study of something, providing with knowledge, causing to know or understand. Maria (1998) stated the importance of listening in language learning and teaching demand on the language teachers is to help their students become effective listeners. Constantine in her journal (2007) covers the subject of podcasts on several levels and deals with the questions of the advantages of podcasts, selection of the most beneficial ones, and discusses how to maximize learning from them. Rosell-Aguilar (2007) suggested that the podcast resources so far made available for language learning can be categorized into two main groups: the first consisting of authentic content provided by native speakers or advanced learners, not intended to teach language and referring to subjects such as news, football, or radio programming. The second group is comprised of language courses or teaching content specifically designed for language learning.

The latter are classified into two subgroups: materials designed for a known audience, such as the materials provided by teachers, institutions or students themselves for use with their classes (which may include audio recordings of texts, oral quizzes, oral feedback, and vocabulary items) and supporting materials designed for independent learners not enrolled on a particular course that are delivered as public podcast.

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Using Podcast for Developing Listening

Listening comprehension plays a critical role in language learning. It is not a passive activity, but rather a complex, active process in which the listener must discriminate between sounds and understand vocabulary and grammatical structures (Vandergrift, 1997). In addition, acquiring listening skills can be frustrating for students because the process is devoid of those rules inherent in grammar teaching. One of the largest inhibitors for students is the experience of a mental block, when required to make a sudden decision based on information they have heard and not understood. This causes many students to ‘tune out’ or convince themselves that they are unable to understand spoken English well, negatively affecting their motivation. Over recent decades educators have employed both bottom-up and top-down interactive models to teach listening.

However, researchers have expressed the belief that neither model is capable of addressing the intricacies of the listening process. Therefore attempts have been made to define a pedagogical model comprising contextualised, individual, social, cultural, affective, strategic and critical dimensions to support second language listening.
In view of this, it is possible to understand why audio from the Internet has become an increasingly popular resource (Anusiené & Kavaliauskiené, 2009). Using podcasts as a medium for learning opens up new opportunities in the language learning context: research shows that audio content facilitates memory retention three times as effectively as a text. The auditory dimension of podcasting, e.g., intonation or vocal expression, conveys a message directly to the listener’s heart and brain. The personal touch, including expression of emotions, feelings and tonal variations may contribute to a podcast message, in a way that cannot be achieved with a textual message .

Conclusion

The primary aim of this article has been to determine whether podcasts affect Saudi participants’ listening comprehension. The findings revealed positive results. Thus, this study supports the notion that the use of podcasts can make a positive and significant difference to the listening comprehension.

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