INTRODUCTION

A good teacher is like a candle- it

consumes itself to light the way for others.

The present curs paper is entitled Teaching Listening Comprehension to Beginners,

and it is devoted to the field of methodology.

Listening is the basic language skill in TEFL. Morley tells us that We listen twice as
much as we speak, four times as much as we read, and five times as much as we write, that is
why the skill requires much effort, skill and drilling.

The main goal of the research is to examine and to analyze the principles of teaching
listening in TEFL, and to provide a number of listening techniques that will help in developing
this skill to beginners.
Our objectives are:
1) to identify the characteristics of listening as a cognitive process;
2) to examine the most frequent problems of developing listening to beginners of
language acquisition;
3) to determine the difficulties of pupils while listening;
4) to provide a list of the most effective techniques overcoming listening difficulties.
The research has a classic structure, being composed of an introduction, three chapters,
conclusion and bibliography.
Chapter 1 is entitled The Roles of Listening in TEFL, and it provides the theoretical
foundation for teaching listening. It views the listening process from the pshycho-linguistic
prospective and as it is an invisible mental process, it is rather difficult to be defined and gives
several different definitions of the listening process. For example Michael Rost states:
Listening is a process of receiving what a speaker actually says, constructing and representing
the meaning, negotiating the meaning with the speaker and responding and creating meaning
through involvement, imagination and empathy.
As well, it is focused on three main stages involved in the auditory process, such as:

a) Hearing .
b) Choosing the information.
c) Understanding and responding.
All these processes form a complicate mechanism which was called by Richard Anderson
schemata. It includes two psycho-linguistic models: top-down processing that refers to utilizing
schemata(background information) to derive meaning from and interpret the message;
and bottom-up processing that deals with deriving the meaning of the message based on the
incoming language data. Stress, rhythm and intonation also play an essential role in the bottom-
up processing.
Chapter 2 is entitled Developing Strategies for Teaching Listening to Beginners and it
is focused on different listening techniques. According to Doughlas Brown classroom listening
performances can be classified in the following way:
a) Reactive-
b) Intensive
c) Responsive
d) Selective
e) Extensive
f) Interactive
And as well we have given the definition of each type of listening performances.

Chapter 3 is entitled Designing Listening activities for Beginners and it provides the
most useful listening techniques for beginners based on the book Magic English of the third
forms. The activities are classified according different units and topics.

The main methods that were applied in this research are: analysis, description and
synthesis.

This work will be useful both for students and teachers who are interested in effective ways of
teaching listening skills to beginners.