(Abstract)
With the recent growing emphasis of overwhelming globalization and information -oriented society, communicative language skills are largely needed in foreign language education, as well as listening skills as comprehensive competency th...
(Abstract)
With the recent growing emphasis of overwhelming globalization and information -oriented society, communicative language skills are largely needed in foreign language education, as well as listening skills as comprehensive competency that highly regards practical values are emphasized. Listening is the essential means in order to receive many kinds of information so that listening skills should be firstly learned in foreign language learning. Moreover, the importance of listening skills should be stressed in terms of its easiness to be transferred into other language skills. However, for the importance of listening skills, it is not performed well by teachers with effective and intensive listening teaching skills in a real classroom. Furthermore, learners show inactive and passive attitudes toward their language class. To overcome this problem regarding learner's inactive and passive attitudes, Whole Learning Method, a concept of a strategy, that learners use to comprehend contents of their listening, is adapted and applied.
It is proved that learners who effectively use various strategies in each stage of their foreign language level are more likely to produce better results than the students who do not. However, precedence studies have demonstrated only the effects of learning strategies but have not present specific and manifold strategies that can be applied to improve listening skills. Thus, this study presents various learning strategies that are essentially needed and effectively applied to enhance Japanese listening skills, by seeing different types of problems. This study also suggests strategies and methods for learners to solve the problems easier and faster so that help learners to use the strategies and methods in self listening skill study. Furthermore, this study deals with lesson plans for teachers to use and to increase learner's participation in a Japanese classroom. The details of the content of this study are to understand the concept of listening and then to reveal its role and importance, as well as to examine the specific abilities of listening based on which listening strategies are applied, and also the process of listening.
Learning strategies are divided into six strategies: strategy to understand sound features, strategy to understand scenes and situations, strategy to understand pictures, maps, and letters, strategy to comprehend information given by listening, strategy to understand purposes, and strategy to predict the development of a story, and each strategy is presented with its own sub- classifications.
The strategy to understand sound features is explained with listening to interval geminates, vowel omissions, カタカナのことば, and voiceless vowels. The strategy to understand scenes and situations is mainly divided into comprehending of decision required problems and understanding of questions, and then understanding of questions is explained with finding out 'times, numbers, places, objects, and causes or reasons.' The strategy to understand pictures, maps, and letters means that learners get to know about the pictures, maps and letters by listening, and is presented in different kinds: people, places, objects, graphs, and amounts. The strategy to comprehend information given by listening presents selection questions, blank questions, and questions asking sentence level answers. The strategy to understand purposes is manly divided into pre-listening stage and post-listening stage, at the pre-listening stage predicting content and understanding relevant vocabulary are suggested, and at the post-listening stage making sure of the vocabulary listened, examining the genuineness of the content, answering questions, and arranging are presented by order. The strategy to predict the development of a story deals with listening carefully to the simultaneous expressions, accents, rhythm, tempo of the whole story, understanding the content of the story, based on vocabulary listened, and predicting the future development of the story. Lastly, in order to practically use these strategies, lesson plans that can be applied to a real Japanese classroom are suggested in this study.
To perform effective listening activities, various kinds of listening abilities should work together, therefore, this study specifies the listening abilities and divides them, sets strategies for the each listening ability, and suggests specific methods. What is more, the strategies mentioned in this study should not be applied separately, but the purpose of this study is to deliberate practical communication of learners in their real life by learning integrated listening abilities from strategies with which learners develop and practice their specific listening abilities. This study is also expected to help learners solve their listening problems easily and immediately by performing the strategies, and to develop listening activities that felt passive and difficult by limited listening strategies.
In spite of the limitations that these strategies are not verified in an actual classroom setting, suggesting listening learning strategies and their specific methods could be a small contribution to the filed of Japanese Education that seldom has studies in learning strategies.