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Date Posted: 07:26:21 10/17/05 Mon
Author: Rodrigo Nunes Pinto
Subject: Final paper for evaluation: Listening and grammar: another way of improving students’ skills.

Listening and grammar: another way of improving students’ skills.


Listening is one of the most difficult skills to deal with. This could probably have been said by either a student or by a teacher. It is partially true as far as comprehension is concerned. While we are listening to something, even in our native language, it is not rare to mishear a word, be deceived by the real intentions of the speaker when irony is intended, ignore a very specific item of vocabulary or how to deal with metaphor. If it occurs in our native language, why would it be different in a second language? I have noticed some common problems my students have in listening comprehension and I believe that knowing grammar can help them overcome these problems.

Many of my students have already had some experience in learning English, either at school or in a private English school. Others are giving themselves a last chance before abandoning the course. It is here that listening comprehension plays an important role.
Those indecisive students generally complain that after being studying for many years they still feel unable to understand songs, people in films or follow TV programmes on cable TV. Some are fairly fluent while speaking, but they lack confidence when they have to listen to native speakers. They feel as if they have lost their precious time and money studying English for so many years since they still fail to cope with more realistic situations, such as meeting tourists or travelling abroad.

Students may find some difficulties in learning English due to the language itself and to the way it is presented to them. English has a wide range of vocabulary and of other features, such as phrasal verbs, which are generally difficult for students to understand. Mary Underwood (1990) mentions Simon Garrod who “suggests that the act of comprehension requires listeners to place the words in context at the same time as they process the sounds”(p.3). Later, according to Underwood ,

“native speakers, when listening, can call upon their accumulated knowledge of the culture and background of the speaker (…). They expect certain kinds of language to occur in particular situations (…). From lifelong experience, native speakers can put what they hear in context, even though they may sometimes need to make adjustments when speakers do not say what they expect them to say”. (...) “As listeners, we often predict what will follow and then try to ‘match’ what we actually hear with our prediction. Even if the ‘match’ is not perfect, we are generally at least in the right area and have no problem in understanding”.

Moreover, grammar structures may not have been correctly dealt with in a classroom and it frequently affects the students’ ability to listen to English because they do not recognize what they have learned in what is being heard. Consequently, the learner frequently encounters some unfamiliar grammar structures, words, colloquialism and informal speech in listening passages that hinder understanding and I have noticed that students complain about it at many times.

We generally tend to neglect the advantages of teaching grammar in tandem with a listening activity. Some would say that it is, in the least, awkward. However, when students are asked to perform a listening activity, knowing the form of the grammatical structures involved is going to facilitate the accomplishment of the task. In examples such as “I’ve finished”, since it is pronounced in the same way as “I finished”, students may notice the correct tense to be used if they really know the grammar of Present Perfect Tense, that is, its meaning, its form and its usage. When listening to sentences starting with “ I wish…”, if grammar is known, students can predict the following use of Simple Past and make use of the strategy of predicting, just to mention some few examples.
Rost's 1990 mentions that:

“The grammar and lexicon of the text create equations among the slots in a specific instantiation of a schema. The listener’s task in understanding a speaker will involve integrating knowledge from schemata (associated with utterance) and the propositional information available”(p.33).
On the whole, I should say that listening activities connected with grammar help students become better listeners. Many teachers with no experience of approaching these two skills together as presented here may find it hard to treat them as presented here. Far from being the only solution to student’s difficulties in listening I strongly believe that it is one more available procedure to be used and our role as teachers is to help students take chances in order to strengthen their confidence for the listening experiences they will have outside the classroom.


ROST,M.(1990). Auditory Perception and Linguistic Processing.In Applied Linguistics and
Language Study. Listening in Language Learning. Chapter 2. p.33, London: Longman.
UNDERWOOD,M. (1990).Teaching Listening,London:Longman.

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