TEACHING INDEPENDENT LISTENING COMPREHENSION ONLINE: FINDINGS OF THE PRELIMINARY STUDY

The article addresses the issue of teaching independent listening comprehension in the emergency distance education (EDE) caused by Covid-19 pandemic. The paper describes the preliminary study of developing university students' listening skills in on-line instruction mode. The authors consider the main challenges that practitioners face while building students' listening skills. These include difficulties ranging from text selection, linguistic and conceptual complexities of authentic audio/video materials and task construction to organizing listening practice beyond the classroom as well as checking students' comprehension upon listening/viewing. The hypothesis of the research states that due to the enhanced digital literacy of teachers and learners as a result of EDE listening could be practiced effectively in the asynchronous format as an independent activity. This would allow learners a certain degree of autonomy and would spare the virtual contact time for practicing oral production and interaction in the synchronous mode. The authors have surveyed 75 second-year students of Linguistics at three Ukrainian universities to elicit their perceptions of the on-line instruction effects on the development of four language skills and listening in particular. The survey also gave the possibility to elicit preferences in topics, text types and sources in independent listening practice, as well as views on organization of independent listening (frequency of listening practice sessions, length of texts, etc.). The survey findings presented in this article helped the authors to outline the parameters of the independent listening that would benefit the development of students' listening skills and consequently develop the methodology of teaching these skills independently. The latter has already been designed and implemented in practice, thus making up a focus of further research.