Annotation-Listening

In Verdugo & Belmonte’s article, “Using Digital Stories to Improve Listening Comprehension with Spanish Young Learners of English”, their research topic is listening comprehension. They analyze the importance of English stories to young ESLs so that they could get some information to the listening comprehension. Furthermore, the article develops their themes to the digital story to research how digital story help EFL students to learn English.

Verdugo & Belmonte indicate out several points about the advantages of stories to support that they are suitable for young ESLs in learning their English ability. According this article, stories has several characteristics in the following. First, stories demonstrate linguistic forms, grammar, phrases, vocabulary, and formulaic speech within a meaningful and structured context that supports comprehension of the narrative world. Students could learn these things from listening to stories, they could learn unconsciously in the process of listening. Second, since stories are not all texts at all, they usually contented with pictures or illustrations so that students could rebuild the whole story by them if they couldn’t understand the story by reading texts.

There are three features that this article mentions about digital stories. For one, digital stories provide students realistic pictures as visual ones to convey students the meanings. Usually, primary learners learn English under the help of visual assisting. Second, listening to others telling stories seem a one way communication; however, digital stories are interactive. In listening to digital stories, students have to do some instructions to the computer so that they could move to next chapter to proceed their listening. And the last one of the features is that once the listening comprehensions of students are not good enough to follow the pace of stories, they could choose to play the story in lower pace so that they could comprehend.

I find things mentioned above from the article are useful to me when I’m teaching English to students. These points and features are not only suitable in listening stories but also able to be used in teaching appropriately. When I speaking English to my students, I would notice if any student couldn’t understand what I’m saying. I realize the importance of listening ability to primary ESLs; therefore, I would take notice of this. This article helps me a lot for it provide me some advice to notice how students could learn more and fast in listening English stories.