An Action Research to enhance the Listening Skills of Secondary Students

 

The researcher conducted certain activities for Class VIII-U students of St Mary’s HSS Pattom so as to increase their listening comprehension skills.The researcher provided an awareness class on the need to develop listening skills,in our personal, social and educational lives, prior to the start of conducting the activities. This helped the students to have an idea about the concept of listening and the instructions that had to be followed during the course of the listening activities. 

A PRETEST to check the listening comprehension was given on 01 July2023, during the Hindi period. The researcher played the recording of the beginning of the play ‘The Importance of being Earnest’. The students had problem in understanding the name of the characters. Then the researcher read the same portion of the audio recording which helped many of the students to comprehend and respond to the first 10 questions with options. But they had difficulty to answer the rest of the questions in detail.

Day-1

The researcher told the instruction of the “Whisper Game.’ Then the researcher called ten students to the front of the class so as to avoid noise and told one of the students a famous line from the fairy tale ‘Snow White and the seven dwarfs’ – “Mirror, Mirror, on the wall who is the fairest among all”- The students were not able to get it right in the first go, but they insisted to do the same for a second time. The researcher gave them another tongue-twister “Betty bought butter but the butter was bitter, so Betty bought better butter to make the bitter butter better.” The students already knew the tongue-twister as the same example was used to teach them the poetic-device Alliteration. So they made sure to say the words slowly and clearly so as to not lose. But overall the students enjoyed the activity.

Day-2 

The researcher did the second activity during the study time from 1:00 pm to I:15pm. The researcher told the instructions to draw a snowman loudly and clearly. The students listened and drew the snowman, as per the instructions. The activity was not that interesting as the previous one but it was definitely unusual and good.

Day-3 

The researcher reminded the students about the opposites of certain words as they had forgotten many of them. Then the researcher told them the instruction which was to say the opposite of the said sentence as fast as possible. The researcher divided the students into two teams so as to spice up the competition and made the students of the opposite team B tell a sentence which the selected team member of team A had to tell and write the opposite of the sentence uttered within 60 seconds. The students enjoyed the activity as they were focused on making their team win. Eventually team A won and it was definitely fun in a healthy way. 

Day-4

My Favorite Toss is the type of activity were words are connected or linked to the previous sentence. The listening skill and memory can be analyzed with this activity. The first student started by saying that ‘My favorite game is Cricket.’ The next student continued the sentence by saying that Madhav’s favorite game is Cricket. My favorite game is Football. The students liked the activity as it was truly an engaging one where they were completely focused on their peer’s favorites so as to say it correctly,

Day-5

The researcher said the telephone numbers at a moderate speed which the students had to write correctly. The numeral ‘zero’ was said as the letter ‘o’ which the students had to write as 0. The activity was completely different from the normal ones given in their classes especially as it helped the students to lessen their tension of their monthly tests.

Day-6

The researcher asked the students to read a news report to which the students listened attentively. The students wrote news headlines appropriate to the one read. The students loved to write news headlines on the black board and actively responded with creative and funny news headlines appropriate to the news report read.  

Day-7

 

The researcher played the audio of the famous song by Boney M ‘Ma Baker.’ The students found it easy to comprehend the main word in the song ‘money.’ But they had to listen to the songs thrice in order to understand the lyrics of the song clearly. The students loved the song as it was really engaging and made them relieve of their stress of the upcoming exam. Also as it was a group activity, many minds worked together to fill the missing gaps of lyrics. The students loved the activity the most.

The researcher gave the post-test on 13^th July 2023, Thursday. The researcher played the audio-recording again, which the students were able to understand easily. They answered the questions much better than the pre-test. They certainly had an improvement in enhancing their listening skills. But overall, they understood the importance of listening to others by being present in the moment.