The main difficulties in learning a foreign language

This article discusses some of the difficulties in understanding foreign speech in listening. The perception and understanding of speech is a very complex mental activity and listening is by no means an easy type of speech activity. The acquisition of a foreign language and the development of speech skills is carried out mainly through listening. Therefore, listening should be developed better than other skills, but in fact, listening causes the greatest difficulties.


INTRODUCTION
Listening is one of the most difficult types of speech activity, it is not an easy speech activity.The most significant difficulty in listening is the lack of an ability for the auditor to regulate activities.Listening is the only type of speech activity in which nothing depends on the person performing it.
Listening, requiring extremely intense mental activity, causes rapid fatigue and disabling the listener's attention.Unfavorable conditions for the auditor, of course, make it difficult to master it.Thus, the presence of significant and varied listening difficulties is an indisputable fact.Obviously, for successful learning, listening requires a methodological system that takes into account these difficulties and provides for their overcoming.
Removing difficulties, naturally, facilitates mastering listening and gives quick and tangible results.Therefore, teachers often strive to facilitate the activities of students.Since the main purpose of training is to prepare the learner for speech communication in natural conditions, the learning process will only be focused and effective when the student has already encountered the difficulties of natural speech and learned to overcome them.Consequently, it seems correct not to eliminate, but to gradually and consistently overcome difficulties in the learning process.
It should also be noted that excessive facilitation of activity does not contribute to its improvement.As psychologists point out, the most effective is such training in any activity, which is carried out in conditions of high tension of the individual psyche, mobilizing his will and attention, and the precise functioning of all mental mechanisms.Thus, such a training should be considered useful for improving listening, in which rather difficult exercises are performed, however, subject to the viability of these difficulties.
In order to focus on teaching listening to overcome difficulties and develop on this basis skills and abilities capable of successfully operating in natural conditions, it is necessary to clearly imagine these difficulties.The difficulties of listening can be related to: a) with the language form of the message; b) with the semantic content of the message; c) with the terms of the presentation of the message; d) with sources of information.e) due to the unexplored language material contained in the message; f) due to the presence in the message of a familiar, but difficult for listening comprehension language material.Overcoming the difficulty of understanding a text containing unexplored language material is provided by the formation of the ability to guess the meaning of new words, as well as the ability to understand the meaning of the phrase and the text as a whole, despite the presence of unfamiliar elements in it.For this purpose, we can recommend exercises that teach guesses on word-formation elements, guesses about the meaning of common root words with studied, converted and international words, as well as context guesses.
The ability to understand the meaning, despite the presence in the text of unfamiliar language material, is formed with the help of exercises that teach the understanding of groups of words, phrases and microtexts containing unfamiliar language material.
The second group of difficulties at the level of language material is related to the fact that when familiarizing with new words, grammatical phenomena or speech patterns, the attention of students is usually attracted to the difficulties of reproducing this material, while the difficulties of recognition remain unworked.This leads to the fact that not all studied language material is easily learned by students during reading and listening.
In order to ensure the correct recognition of linguistic material, one should pay attention to the difficulties that may arise when listening to it.It is also necessary to perform special exercises for recognizing these phenomena in phrases and microtexts.
Speaking about the difficulties of language form, it should be mentioned about the length of sentences.It is known that the amount of short-term memory, in which the phrase is stored until its end, is small.In the event that the length of the sentence exceeds the amount of memory, the listener forgets the beginning of the phrase and therefore cannot synthesize its meaning.Therefore, at the beginning of training the length of the phrase should not exceed 5-6 words.However, in the process of training should increase the number of words in the phrase, so that by the end of training to bring it to 10-12 words.It should also be noted that not only the length of the phrase affects its retention in the memory, but also its depth.
The role of the semantic content of the message for teaching listening is difficult to overestimate.It is known that obtaining information is the goal of receptive types of speech activity.It is difficult and even impossible to make a person listen carefully if the content of the message is familiar to him, or uninteresting, or incomprehensible.It is the desire to understand the meaning that will force the listener to mobilize attention, memory, and all mental activity, make it necessary to overcome difficulties.Therefore, the effectiveness of teaching listening depends primarily on the student's interest in understanding the content of speech.
Often in teaching practice one has to deal with the fact that listening instruction is conducted on uninteresting, non-informative, empty texts.The use of such texts is often explained by the same desire to facilitate the task of the learner, since the foreign language form is difficult, and one should concentrate all the listener's efforts on it, making the content as simple and accessible as possible.Numerous experimental studies confirm the incorrectness of this point of view.Experimental results suggest that students better understand and memorize difficult but informative texts than light but primitive ones.
Thus, the main requirement for the content of the texts for listening should be their entertaining and informative content.Gradation of difficulties in relation to the semantic content of texts can be expressed in the transition from interesting texts to informative.By entertaining include texts that have an interesting plot for this age.These texts can be quite simple and accessible to students.At a more advanced stage, along with entertaining texts one should use content texts, i.e. texts containing new and useful information for students.These include texts of regional geographic and cultural nature, popular science texts, etc.
Facilitates the understanding of the semantic content and also the name of the text, if it reflects the main idea, or the main content of the text.It is useful at the beginning of learning to preface a brief introduction to the text, creating the direction of thought, without, however, retelling the main content.
Taking care of the content of the texts, one should not overload them with information.The feasibility of the text is one of the basic principles of selection.Feasibility is provided by a combination of information content and redundancy.Along with the new information, the texts should contain information already known to students.The presence of such elements creates favorable conditions for the functioning of the mechanism of probabilistic forecasting, increases its reliability and thereby facilitates the understanding of the meaning.
The difficulties associated with the audited speech message should include its volume.Difficult conditions for the reception of auditory information, intense activity of mental mechanisms lead to rapid fatigue, a dulling of attention and refusal to receive information.In order not to cause information overload, the volume of the text should correspond to the student's mental abilities.It is known that the fast pace of presentation of information always causes great difficulties.It has been established that the optimum for the listener is a pace of audited speech that corresponds to the pace of his own speaking.However, the pace of the student's speech in a foreign language is always very slow, therefore, the presentation of the texts at such a pace is impractical.A natural pace, even a slow one, will seem like a student too fast and can be a serious obstacle to understanding.Overcoming this very serious listening difficulty can be done while maintaining the average pace of natural foreign language speech, but under the condition that to ease the understanding at the initial stage, some slowdown of the speech rate is allowed due to the pauses between the phrases.Such pauses, without distorting the correct intonation pattern of the phrase, without reducing the absolute rate of speech, allow the auditor to eliminate the lag in the internal pronunciation.Another prerequisite for understanding the speech of the natural pace is to increase the speed of the student's inner speech.It is known that the lag of internal pronunciation from the pace of the speech being audited is the main reason for not understanding fast speech.In the process of learning to listen, audiovisual and auditing sources of information are used.
The audiovisual sources include: all kinds of visual clarity, accompanied by the teacher's story, sounded movies, television and the speech of the teacher.Audience sources include records, sound recordings and radio programs.
To establish the gradation of difficulties of audiovisual sources, it is necessary to determine how different types of visual support affect listening.For methodological purposes, it is important to distinguish the subject, or pictorial, clarity, as well as the gestures and facial expressions of the speaker, which, although not revealing the content of speech, but convey the emotional attitude of the speaker to the statement.Observation of the speaker's articulation reinforces the auditory sensations and makes the perception of the voiced speech more complete and accurate.Consequently, the easiest will be the source of information, which combines both types of visibility, i.e. story teacher on the picture.The next most difficult source of information will be a film accompanied by the teacher's speech.
Students will not be able to observe the facial expressions and gestures of the speaker, but the presence of substantive clarity in the form of film frames and the familiar voice will facilitate understanding.Audio recordings are a more complex source of information, since unfamiliar voices are always recorded on them.However, with repeated listening and interruptions in the hearing, making them an easier source of information than radio broadcasts.The value of radio programs lies in the fact that in the process of learning, students use language as a means of natural communication, receiving new interesting information with their help.

CONCLUSION
In conclusion, it should be emphasized once again that effective listening instruction is impossible without taking into account and the gradation of the difficulties of speech activity.A system of exercises designed for teaching listening should be aimed at overcoming these difficulties.The feasibility of the exercises is ensured both by the gradual and sequential inclusion and working out of difficulties, and by the focus of the exercise on overcoming only one new difficulty.