PODCASTING: A TOOL FOR IMPROVING LISTENING SKILLS

Skills of listening in learning a foreign language have been neglected in spite of being most needed ability in everyday communication. Ability t o follow a speaker and respond appropriately needs to be taught like all other lan guage skills. An innovative approach to teaching liste ning skills has emerged due to audio publishing online. It is known as ‘podcasting’ and has become very popular because it offers language learners extra listening practice both ins ide and outside of the classroom. Moreover, podcasting as online communication technology is a new way to inspire learning: it provides an exciting way for students and educators to explo re and discover educational content. Applicability of podcasting to teaching En glish needs researching. This paper describes research into learn ers’ perceptions of online listening to podcasts, self-evaluation of their own performance in individ ual listening practice and reflections on ways of improving listening skills. The findings gi ve insights into a practice of developing listening competence. Some implications of research are described including a recommendation for blended learning, i.e. combinati on of multiple approaches to learning by harmonizing online listening with classroom auditio n activities in teaching / learning English. Introduction Listening skills in language teaching have been neg lected and shifted to a secondary position after speaking and writing. This is a surprising fa ct given that it is the skill that is most often used in communication. It is thought that about for y percent of our daily communication is spent on listening, thirty-five percent on speaking , sixteen percent on reading, and only nine percent on writing. Yet, in spite of its critical r ole in communication and language acquisition, listening comprehension remains one of the least un derstood processes in language learning. By now language practitioners have accepted that li sten ng skills have to be taught like any other language skills. An innovative approach to teaching liste ning skills has emerged due to the hi-tech developments. One of them is a so called ‘podcastin g’ (a portemanteau of the words iPod and broadcasting), which has recently become very popul ar. The term ‘podcast’ was first coined in 2004, and it means the publishing of audio via t he Internet. Audio recording is designed to be downloaded and listened to on a portable MP3 pla yer of any type, or on a personal computer. Listening to audio is nothing new to the Internet. Audio files available for downloading and other means of online listening hav e been around for some time. Podcasting differs from other ways of delivering audio online by the idea of automatically downloaded content. Podcasting offers language teachers and st udents a wide range of possibilities for extra listening practice both inside and outside of the classroom. Moreover, podcasts enable students to practice listening in a self-directed m anner and at their own pace. By 2005, the concept of ‘podcasting’ reached its top point: thou sands of podcasts were created, and The New Oxford American Dictionary named a ‘podcast’ it s official ‘Word of the Year’. The aims of research are 1) to examine the challenges that students face in listening to various authentic English podcasts, and 2) analyze learners’ self-assessment data on various ways of improving listening skills. The research me thods include 1) the survey of students’ self-evaluation of their performance in listening t o podcasts, and 2) students’ reflections on their experience of online listening and listening activities in the class. The intended outcome of research is to formulate the tips for good pract ice in improving learners’ listening skills. The participants in this study are students of diff erent specializations who study English for Specific Purposes at the Faculty of Social Policy, M kolas Romeris University, Lithuania. Defining podcasting and its advantages ‘Podcasting’ , created by former MTV VJ Adam Curry, is a term tha t w s devised as a way to describe the technology used to push audio content from websites down to consumers of that content, who typically listen to it on their iPod ( hence the ‘pod’) or other audio player that supports MP3 at their convenience. The term podcast ing is meant to rhyme with broadcasting. According to P. Constantine (2007), a podcast is the name of a digital recording of a r adio broadcast or similar program. Podcasts published on the internet as MP3 files. Interested listeners are able to download these MP3 files onto their personal computer or personal MP3 player of any type. The files can be listened to at the convenience of the listener. Learners ca n listen over and over to any material that is of interest to them. Podcasts can be as short as two to three minutes and as long as an hour. Learners can subscribe to a podcast through an RSS subscription (Really Simple Syndication). D. Mendelson, (1994), cited by P. Constantine (2007 ), offers some techniques that enhance learning and help the listeners focus on any listen ng activity: 1) Listen for one crucial detail, 2) Listen for all the details, 3) Listen for the g ist, 4) Listen for mood and atmosphere, 5) Listen to form hypotheses and make predictions, 6) Listen to make an inference. According to T. Robb (2007), the rise in popularity of podcasting actually allow s the reincarnation of activity types that have recently fallen into disuse. In the 70s and 80s, it was common for teachers to have their students record their own voice for various types o f practice activities, such as the practice of specific segmental phonemes, or ‘pair taping‘ activ ities where the students had to record their own conversations. Now with digital recording, it i s back, and in a form that it easier than ever to use and with greater functionality. Podcasts are part of innovative online l earning and can serve a number of purposes: to enhance the range and register of English language listening practice material available for the students to use in a variety of ways; to provide in creased connectivity between different elements of the course; to increase the scope for d iscussion activity, etc. The podcasts online have given the lang u ge teacher a wealth of materials for teaching listening skills. P. Constantine (2007) covers the subject of podcasts on several levels and deals with the questions of the advantages of podca sts, selection of the most beneficial ones, and discusses how to maximize learning from them. The advantages of podcasts are: 1) learners can benefit from global listening, even if they only listen from three to five minutes a day; 2) students will be exposed to the new languag e; 3) the intermediate learner has a need for authentic texts and to be exposed to a variety of voices. Podcasts are not just intended for listening. Often there is a transcript provided al ong with worksheets. A number of websites interact with the students and ask them to write in with questions or comments. According to P. Constantine (2007), one innovative usage of podc asts is to have a student listen to a podcast and read along its transcript. Then the stu dent will make a recording of the material on a cassette tape and turn it into the teacher alo ng with a written journal. The teacher then listens to the student’s recording and gives approp riate feedback to the student. This type of activity helps the students to develop fluency in r eading, to improve pronunciation, to acquire new vocabulary words, and to perfect listening skil l . It is assumed that podcasting is especia lly interesting for English learners as it provides a means for students to get access to ‘authentic’ l istening sources about almost any subject that may interest them. Teachers can take advantage of podcasts as a basis for listening comprehension exercises, as a means of generating c onversation based on students' reaction to podcasts, and as a way of providing each and every student diverse listening materials. Review of literature Although once labelled a passive skill, listening i s an active and demanding process of selecting and interpreting information from auditor y and visual clues. What is known about the listening process basically emerges from resear ch on developments in native language. In listening, there are several major steps that may o ccur sequentially or simultaneously, in rapid succession, or backward and forward. The major poin ts i clude determining a reason for listening, predicting information, attempting to or ganize information, assigning a meaning to the message, and transferring information from shor t-term memory to long-term memory. Earlier research into listening processe s by V. M. Rivers (1992:18) suggests that “listening involves active cognitive processing – t he construction of a message from phonic material”. Three stages in the aural reception of a message are distinguished: 1) “listeners must recognize in phonic substance sound patterns i n bounded segments related to phrase structure. At this stage students are dependent on echoic memory, which is very fleeting. 2) Listeners must immediately begin processing, identi fyi g the groupings detected according to the content of our central information system. 3) L isteners recycle the material they organized through immediate memory, thus building up an audit ory memory which helps to retain the segments listeners are processing”. An important fe atur of the listening process is that much of processing of incoming information takes place d uring the pauses in speech. Pauses in natural speech allow students to gain processing ti me. Moreover, much of comprehension involves drawing inferences. A characteristic featu re of listening is a creation of mental messages which are stored by learners. This phenome non is known as a false recognition memory (Rivers, 1992). According to V. Cook (1996:69), restrict ions on learner’s ability to underst