3.2. Other criteria for materials selection Needs analysis needs analysis by carrying out a careful “needs analysis” we can be ensure that the material chosen is as relevant and useful to students as possible. An additional problem in many English as a Second Language (ESL) classes in particular, is that the needs and aspirations of the students in one class vary greatly, making it very difficult to accommodate everyone’s needs in the same course.

Motivation problem of boring the students: To avoid boring the students, the highly relevant material needs to be peppered with other, different types of material in order to break the tedium and at the same time to expose the students to other types of language. all the time. Such an approach makes space for humorous, general interest, and other listening as well, which enhances motivation –something that should be consciously and deliberately worked at all the time.

Level of difficulty A final factor that needs to be taken into account in materials selection is the level of difficulty of the material in relation to the proficiency level of the students. Subjecting students to material that is too difficult can be a humiliating and demotivating experience, and subjecting them to material that is too easy can be equally demotivating.

4. Instruction Not only should speaking and listening be integrated (united), the researcher will also be making the case for teaching interactive listening strategies. 5. Learning strategies for listening 5.1. Concept Chamot’s definition (1987: 71) proposed as the working definition for learning strategies: Learning strategies are techniques, approaches, or deliberate actions that students take in order to facilitate the learning and recall of both linguistic content area information.

5.2. Principles that should underlie all listening comprehension courses

- the level of difficulty should be carefully set (discussed above) - the delivery (recording) should be natural - the material should be video not audio - the course should cover different kinds of listening - there should be a recognition of the importance of prior knowledge - Pre-listening should precede the listening - students should know what they are listening for - Post-listening should follow the listening - the course should teach, not test (discussed above) - the course should include training in hypothesis formation, prediction and making inferences (drawn largely from Mendelsohn 1994).

5.3. Types of instruction Strategy instruction: This is the “weak” or less intense version of how to incorporate strategies into the teaching of listening. It takes the form of a very close examination of the materials/textbooks being used, and designing activities that “inject” strategy instruction into the existing course/material. In effect, it is strengthening the “how to” component of the existing listening course through the teaching of strategies. This will make it less testing-like and more teaching-like.

A strategy-based approach, then, is a methodology that is rooted in strategy training … It is an approach that sees the objective of the ESL course as being to train students how to listen, by making learners aware of the strategies that they use, and training them in the use of additional strategies that will assist them in tackling the listening task… Learners have to be weaned away from strategies that are unhelpful or even destructive, like grabbing for a dictionary …, and these have to be replaced by such helpful strategies as guessing the meaning of a word from the context.

A “strategy-based” approach requires that the information derived from SIMT be used to form a hypothesis as early as possible. Forming a hypothesis, predicting and making inferences all require courage on the part of the L2 learner. They require that the learner takes a “leap” and they may well be wrong. We do this all the time in our first language (L1), but ironically, learners in their L2, where they need these strategies even more, are more loath to use them. At the root of this strategy-based approach, then, is the idea that the listener who does not understand everything will use whatever signals they can in order to form a hypothesis as to the meaning as early on as possible. This hypothesis formation requires the use of one or both of two additional “guessing” strategies – predicting and making an inference.

Mendelsohn describes in great detail how we can teach strategies to determine the main meaning or the essence of the meaning of an utterance. This is an extremely important strategy for L2 learners as they often become overwhelmed when listening in the same way with the same concentration to every word, and miss the point of what is being said. What is needed is to make students realize that the essence of the meaning of an utterance resides in the stressed words which, more often than not, are the “content words,” while the “grammatical words” are mainly unstressed. In order for an L2 learner to use the appropriate strategies, there are a number of things they need to learn about the structure of information in English:

“meaning carriers.” 1. they need to pay more attention to the stressed words than to the unstressed words because they are the main “meaning carriers.” louder longerpitchprominence precision of articulation 2. they need to learn to identify the stressed words acoustically. Brown (1990) talks of them being louder, longer, having greater pitch prominence, and greater precision of articulation. Mendelsohn (1994) proposes practicing the acoustic identification of stress/ unstressed by using a fictitious language which shares the rules of stress as English, so that the students will be forced to concentrate merely on this feature. “fall behind” 3. if they disregard the unstressed words, they will not “fall behind” and will be able to follow the stressed words (i.e., they are less likely to feel that the speaker is speaking too fast).