The Role of Visual Components in Teaching and Assessing Listening Comprehension

Seminar paper from the year 2011 in the subject Didactics for the subject English - Pedagogy, Literature Studies, grade: 1,0, University of Regensburg (Institut für Didaktik Englisch), language: English, abstract: Next to reading, writing and speaking, listening comprehension lies at the heart of language learning. However, it has also proved to be difficult for the language learner to acquire and for language teachers to teach and to assess. Teachers do not only need a rich understanding of the listening process but also strategies that enable them to teach listening effectively and to assess it in a rational way. The procedure of testing can be divided up into two theoretical fields. First, the large field of teaching listening comprehension and second the field of actually testing it. Both fields need to be carried out thoughtfully in order to achieve success in the whole process. Despite or maybe even due to the difficulty that lies in listening comprehension itself and in teaching it, 'L2 listening remains the last researched of all four language skills. However, in recent years there has been an increased focus on L2 listening ability since its importance in language acquisition has finally been acknowledged and is now regarded as as a skill that requires more classroom attention. In particular the field of teaching listening with the help of technology has been investigated since the revolution in multimedia has made available a large variety of aural and visual text in foreign languages.