As one of the types of speech activity, listening is considered to be the most difficult for the mastering it by students. This problem is particularly urgent to non-linguistic higher educational institution students. Doing exercises on listening, students improve the ability to predict the content, to distinguish important things, to find minor details, to establish relationships of cause and effect.
Listening is the activity that involves the processes of perception, recognition, and understanding a foreign language. Since listening is one-time, speech perception depends on the skill to hold in the memory the results of sense and semantic analysis for a certain period of time.
The main goal is to develop such skills as observation, classification, selection, elimination of hypotheses. Only a student who has them, can consciously perceive and organize information and analyze it.
It is very important to choose a text for listening. The texts should be formed on the basis of the original English language sources. Particular attention should be paid to the nature of texts: their cognitive value, information content and quality.
We carried out listening on three stages: pretext, text and posttext. On pretext stage the task of the teacher is to create conditions for possible prediction of the text content and the removal of lexical, grammatical, and phonetic difficulties of perception. To solve the first problem (prediction of contents), before each text questions are given, the answers to which have to suggest an idea to students to determine its probable topic that will greatly facilitate the perception of what they heard.