Teaching Listening Skill In Public High Schools In The Kingdom of Essay

Teaching Listening Skill In Public High Schools In The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia - Essay Example This essay declares that listening comprehension is a process in which listeners take part in the role of discriminating between sounds, understanding grammatical structures and vocabulary, interpreting stress and intonation, and consequently interpreting the utterance within the context. It is not easy to master listening skill and for this reason most second language learners feel frustrated about it. This report makes a conclusion that all humans are born with an innate ability to hear, though, hearing is not listening. A number of factors must be considered to help second language students develop effective listening skill. Models of the listening process which include the bottom up, interactive and top down are basic in teaching listening skills. Children gain the entire list of phonemes for the first language so easily early in the language acquisition process. This is, however, not the case with adults intending to learn a second language; it is usually very problematic. When one is past puberty, the brain has already programmed all first language phonemes that it intends to recognize into fixed categories. Creating another set for the phonemes of second language is difficult. Second language speakers tend to assimilate the second language phonemes into their established first language system. It is for this reason that speakers find it challenging to distinguish between thei r native language and the second language.