Learning English listening skills by students of senior school

Abstract

The article determines the place of listening in the course of learning English, discusses the features of teaching listening in a foreign language, in particular in English, for senior students of a secondary school. One of the most important roles in the process of learning a foreign language is played by the development of learning listening skills, because most of the information people perceive by ear. The attainment of great success in the process of learning listening in English is possible only with the help of effective methods of training and motivation. The analysis of studies of Ukrainian and foreign scientists was carried out. Particular attention is paid to finding the components of the process of understanding a message in a foreign language, identifying the difficulties of learning to listen, their impact on the quality of understanding foreign language speaking and finding ways to overcome these difficulties. Both internal and external factors that affect the process of perceiving and understanding a message by ear are determined. These factors make perception difficult and hinder the mental process of decoding the sound stream of speech into meaning, that is, makes understanding difficult, which occur at various stages of perception. As a way of teaching listening to texts in English, the use of Englishlanguage podcasts was chosen in accordance with the program topics for senior school students. The article describes the structure of a podcast and suggests the stages of working with podcasts in English lessons. Regardless of the chosen podcast, listening in senior school should cover some steps of dealing with it and be relevant to the topic of the lesson. Such steps, as pre-listening, predicting content, listening for gist, listening for specific information, listening for details are suggested in the theses.