Listening has long been considered a difficult and boring subject by many second
language learners. It takes much time and energy to make progress in this skill. For
listening teachers, correspondingly, it is a difficult task to get students involved in listening
lessons. Nonetheless, just as other teachers do, listening teachers should create an
interesting and motivating learning environment on one hand; and on the other hand, they
must become aware of difficulties and problems facing their students, then, select the best
techniques to help them.
At my upper secondary school, teaching and learning listening is a really new
challenging job. In addition to the lack of well-equipped facilities, teaching listening
methods are quite new and unfamiliar to teachers. Since the new English textbook was in
use, they have been inexperienced in teaching listening methodology and approaches.
Another problem is students’ low levels of proficiency in term of vocabulary, grammar,
pronunciation, skills and so forth. It is the reason why students find it difficult and tough to
listen to and they are not confident enough to do listening tasks successfully. Moreover,
learning habits do not help much to improve their listening in classroom. The students
often get bored, tired and indifferent in listeninglessons because of the quality of teacher’s
voice and pronunciation, uncreative tasks and activities, topics, and so on. In my opinion,
there is a must to work out current and potential problems, then, create better suitable
teaching methods and strategies that can facilitatethe effectiveness of listening lessons.