Internet-based Resources for Developing Students’ Listening Skills in Grade 9

CONCLUSION
The author of the Paper has investigated the possibilities of developing students’ listening skills using the Internet-based listening resources. While researching this theme, the author came to the conclusion that teaching listening not only improves students’ listening skills, but also can provide communication development as students discuss different situations and problems connected with them, they share impressions, experience, interests, views, feeling and their knowledge, they enlarge their vocabulary as they listen to the new words and remember them. Students can learn effectively if they are motivated and interested in the learning process. Using listening tasks from textbooks is effective, but due to their academic purposes do not expose students to natural spoken English. Thus the author of the Paper assumed that the Internet-based resources may lead to more effective developing students’ listening skills.
As it was found, all five students are active internet users. They use the internet for listening to music, watching movies, playing games and listening to radio. Due to this fact, there were no difficulties for the author to encourage students to use the Internet for developing listening skills.
After having conducted the research, the author of the Paper concluded that numerous aspects should be considered before using the Internet-based resources for developing listening.
Concerning listening Internet-based resources, they should cover the range of students` interests same as be useful for the listening part during English exam. What is more, they should be free of charge, safe, which means not containing inappropriate information and visuals, and of good quality. Lastly, listening Internet-based resources should expose students to diverse aspects of the spoken English such as different accents and dialects. Furthermore, a teacher should consider which materials to choose from Internet for listening. They should provide the scripts and visual information, and be of appropriate level.
What concerns the process of listening to authentic Internet-based materials students have to possess prior background knowledge of vocabulary, grammar and spoken language features like stress, intonation, pitch and volume in order to be able to listen to.
During the research students were asked to do different kinds of activities and use different Internet-based resources for listening at home in order to improve their listening skills and create their language learning motivation. According to students’ feedbacks, the most effective was the lesson based on video. The author of the Paper concluded that using video for teaching listening is not only motivating but also a good way to improve students’ comprehension of the listening text. This was the reason for students to choose the Internet-based video resources for additional listening at home more often than listening to news or podcasts.
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