Training English Listening using E-learning Resources

Listening is the main link in the process of learning conversational speech. This article is devoted to the implementation of modern teaching methods for understanding English speech using e-learning resources. There are many diverse listening instructional techniques. The main goal of this article is to provide an alternative approach to solving the issue of teaching a foreign language, namely, to teach students to understand English speech using the elearning resources. This article discusses a new listening skills development system. The essence of this technique is not to go from simple to complex, as most methodologists suggest, but on the contrary, from complex to simple. This technique will allow students to practice their speech perception skills in such a way that after a certain time they will feel more confident when performing this type of work. To test this technique, two groups of students were selected: Group 1. A regular group that carried out the task after listening to the text at the usual fast pace. Group 2. An experimental group that carried out the task after passing 4 stages of this lesson. The article presents comparative results of the assignment of two groups of students. The results of this study are presented in summary tables, where you can compare which group carried out the task better regular or experimental. The tables also show the percentages of each student and each group as a whole. The results are that the proposed method increases speech perception by 23 percent.


Introduction
Information technologies are developing rapidly in all areas of education. The use of electronic educational resources in many universities has become the most relevant means of teaching various disciplines. This expands the possibilities of a more in-depth educational process, especially when teaching foreign languages. As shown by psychological and pedagogical research in this area, it is the use of electronic educational resources in educational process allows the faculty member to put into practice innovative ideas and trends of individualization and informatization of education. These includes building students' individual educational trajectories, implementation in the educational process principles of the competencebased approach, enhancing the independent activity of students and others (Isupova & Suvorova, 2014).
Electronic educational resources provide the student with the necessary knowledge, skills and abilities that will be useful for further professional activity, develop the student's ability to find quickly the necessary information. They provide a unique opportunity for independent creative and research activities of students.
They get a unique opportunity to study independently, conduct laboratory or practical work on their own and immediately test their knowledge. They help students become aware of the learning process; develop students' cognitive activity; contribute to achieving the highest possible result in the overall development of all students, including the strongest and weakest; allow for reflection of knowledge (Zabrodina, 2019). Now every university has its own information educational environment. The introduction of electronic learning resources is becoming the main condition for the development of the university's educational space. According to GOST R 53620-2009, an e-learning resource is an educational resource that is presented in electronic and digital form and includes the structure, subject content and metadata about them. An e-learning resource may include data, information, and software necessary for its use in the educational process (GOST R 53620-2009). E-learning resources allow one to implement differentiated and individual approach to learning, and thereby contribute to the development of personality in the process of their own activities, focused on development of research skills of students, effectively improving the success rate of mastering a foreign language. Projects implemented with the use of electronic educational resources help to diversify classes held on textbooks, as well as implement a comprehensive approach to learning and significantly increase motivation to learn a foreign language.
Speaking about the use of Internet resources in teaching a foreign language it should be noted that the main component of the content of training are various types of speech activity: listening, reading, writing, speaking. Modern electronic educational technologies allow one to practice all types of speech activity Dmitry Zhdanov, Pavel Baklanov / Proceedings IFTE-20202897 according to their didactic capabilities. When teaching listening, much attention is paid to the formation of phonetic skills, control of the correct understanding of the listened text, and the ability to understand authentic speech. Thanks to the educational resources of the Internet, teachers have the opportunity to use various multimedia sources for more effective training in this aspect. Various recordings of native speakers' speech, songs, dialogues, and interesting non-standard tasks are available to teachers and students in full volume (Chueva, 2018).
For a long time in the methodology of teaching foreign languages, listening was not considered as an independent type of speech activity, but as a passive process and a "by-product of speaking" (Galskova, 2007).
However, scientists have shown that listening is an active process, during which mental processes are involved. There is a perception of information in the form of a sound form, its analysis and comparison with standards stored in the long-term memory of students, recognition and understanding of thought.
Listening is closely related to other types of speech activity. Thus, listening and reading are aimed at the perception and semantic processing of information, and this explains the presence of common speech mechanisms that serve receptive types of speech activity. Listening and speaking are two sides of a single phenomenon called oral speech (Nikitina, 2002).

Purpose and objectives of the study
This paper is devoted to the implementation of modern teaching methods for understanding English speech using e-learning resources. The main objective of this paper is to provide an alternative approach to solving the issue of teaching a foreign language, namely, to teach students to understand English speech using the e-learning resources. This article discusses a new listening skills development system.

Literature review
Much is devoted to problems of English listening comprehension training. There are many useful works, which are worth studying: on perception of English speech, perception of English dialects and accents (Aristova, 2011); E-learning (Cai, 2012), where he discusses the application and advantages of e-learning in English teaching, and analyses how to change the pedagogical strategies for teachers to improve teaching efficiency and enable students to master English as a second language quickly and effectively; listening strategies (Chou, 2015), where she put the aim of her study as to investigate what strategies were adopted to listen to general and subject-specific English material. Furthermore, the study examined the process of listening comprehension in relation to the effectiveness of strategy use (Duffy, 2002), where he focuses on defining cognitive strategy instruction in terms of its genesis and on presenting the landmark studies that defined the field. Then, he reviews several more recent sets of studies in which cognitive strategy instruction was embedded in conceptual and programmatic frameworks for comprehension instruction. Habte-Gabr (2006) has also reiterated that these strategies include stimulating learning by building better learning relationship among the teachers and learners. Furthermore, it is also important for learner to know how to reduce the anxiety, show enhanced confidence and keep high motivation to maximize listening comprehension; listening comprehension practice (Gilakjani & Sabouri, 2016). In this paper the researchers review some important issues concerning listening comprehension to provide a basis for developing listening skill in English language teaching (Graham, 2006). The paper of Suzanne Graham is of particular interest to our research, as the main problems highlighted by students were dealing adequately with the speed of delivery of texts, making out individual words in a stream of spoken language, and making sense of any words identified.

Methodology
The term "listening" appeared in the middle of the last century and has since become established in the Russian method of teaching foreign languages, although the term "hearing" is also used when teaching Russian as a foreign language. Traditionally, the term "listening" is used to refer to the complex process of perception and understanding of sounding speech, while the term "hearing" can also be understood as acoustic perception of speech, so in most cases the term "listening" is used. For a long time, when describing listening as a type of speech activity for methodological purposes, attention was rightly paid to: a) a relationship and simultaneity of the process of perception and understanding of the sounding text; b) a receptive nature of this type of activity; c) an analytical-synthetic and mental-mnemic nature of speech activity for understanding the sounding speech in order to obtain information or fully participate in speech communication with other people; d) a system of exercises and tasks that contribute to the development of technical listening skills and speech audio skills, and e) forms of control over the formation of these speech skills.
Considering this type of speech activity in the context of intercultural language education, then when determining the strategy for teaching listening we should also keep in mind the following: listening in the context of intercultural interaction is also mostly a socio-cultural activity for decoding national, regional and continental (for example, pan-European) socio-cultural concepts and the socio-cultural background of audio material. Meanwhile, attention has been drawn to this relatively recently, mainly with the emergence of cultural-oriented methodological approaches, such as socio-cultural, linguistic-cultural, communicative-ethnographic and cultural-sensitive approaches. For effective modern teaching of listening it is far mostly important to understand the task. Also understanding functional purpose of this kind of speech activity for a participant of intercultural communication. In which, as we know, listening is a way of getting to know diverse cultures of the oral environment with the purpose of orientation in it and the instrument for obtaining the necessary information to perform other activities speech and non-speech nature (including educational and self-educational nature), and the evaluation or self-evaluation of their readiness for communication. However, listening becomes an instrument of intercultural communication only if a person consistently develops a culture of perception of the sounding text. Therefore, teaching to listen simply as one of the types of speech activity is no longer enough, the methodology of its training should be built with an orientation to its role in cross-cultural communication and pay special attention to the development of the culture of text perception in listening and reading. Thus, revealing the general and specific in each of these types of speech activity (Safonova, 2011).
It should be borne in mind that in the process of teaching a foreign language at university, many teaching methods can be used in parallel (Zhdanov et al., 2020).
Accordingly, by developing one speech skill, we develop another, thus improving the level of foreign language proficiency. It is a well-known fact that the greatest difficulties in foreign communication a person experiences when listening to a foreign language and understanding it, which are associated with the speech characteristics of native speakers.
The language has a communicative function, so it is not enough to be able to speak a foreign language. It is also important to understand speech by ear. Students are often faced with the problem of understanding foreign speech when learning to speak.
Modern methodological manuals on teaching a foreign language currently indicate that the main purpose of teaching a foreign language is its communicative function. In other words, teachers should primarily teach communication in a foreign language, which implies the priority of listening and speaking skills over other types of speech activity. However, this state of affairs has not always existed. A few years ago, the study of any language was based on the grammar-translation method, that is, the language was studied with the aim of more successful acquisition of grammar and translation skills. Unfortunately, this trend is still observed in many educational institutionsteaching is conducted with the use of outdated educational and methodological complexes, in which the communicative approach is not actually taken into account. In addition, faculty members in most cases are people who have become accustomed to this way of teaching, which is extremely difficult to change.
Consequently, one of the main objectives of language education in higher schools and universities is to prepare the future professional, who possesses not only a certain volume of knowledge, being able to read, translate and communicate in a foreign language. But a professional, that also sees the problems of the world community, understands them and has a view on these issues, which meets the requirements of modern society (Baklanov et al., 2016).
How can we solve the problem of understanding foreign speech by ear?
First of all, it is worth mentioning one important principle that applies almost everywhere: "if you want to learn something, do it as often as possible". In addition, this rule fits the language perfectly. To learn to understand what native speakers are saying, you need to listen to foreign speech as often as possible (Trunov, 2011).
In this regard, when teaching a foreign language to speak, much attention should be paid to listening. Many publications are devoted to listening as one of the main links in the process of learning spoken language.
Linguistic education in its specificity should be targeted to the understanding of the common problems of the world, the pursuit of unity, collaboration and mutual understanding, thus learning a foreign language is considered from the standpoint of the primacy of universal values, humanism, recognizing the great contribution of different peoples to the world civilization society (Baklanov et al., 2017). This paper is devoted to the introduction of modern methods of teaching an understanding of English speech using electronic educational resources. There are basic methods of speech perception: this includes listening with a general understanding of the text, with selective extraction of information, and detailed understanding. There are also many different methods of teaching listening. This is, basically, a system of exercises aimed at developing skills of understanding foreign language speech. Listening is one of the most difficult types of speech activity. Therefore, the primary task of listening is to overcome the difficulties associated with understanding foreign language speech.

Results
Listening to authentic texts is a fairly complicated process, the result of which directly affects the level of self-esteem of the student and the degree of motivation in learning a foreign language. The main purpose of this article is to provide an alternative approach to solving the problem of foreign language teaching, namely, students' ability to understand English using e-learning resources. This alternative approach is primarily due to the fact that the teacher is not in the classroom, where he/she can control the process, where you can see the reaction of students during the lesson. In this case, the teacher works remotely and is not in direct visual contact with students. Therefore, in this case, the approach should differ from the standard one.
This article discusses a completely new, one might say, revolutionary system for practicing listening skills.
There are many techniques for practicing listening skills. Each method is based on the purpose of listening.
The main purpose of listening is to teach students to extract information contained in a long-sounding text, which is transmitted by different persons in live speech, in recordings, when viewing special videos and sound films. However, any method of listening technique boils down to the fact that the whole system is based on the principle of "from simple to complex". And everyone accepts this principle as an axiom, even without assuming that there may be other ways to master the skills of perception of foreign language speech.
The essence of this method is to follow the principle not "from simple to complex", as most methodologists suggest, but, on the contrary, "from complex to simple". The main point of this principle is to show students how to learn to perceive fluent speech and how to achieve certain results using this approach. But the principle of "from complex to simple" does not imply that students will endlessly perform a series of exercises according to this scheme. The main goal is to teach the student to understand fluent authentic speech based on basic skills: a) Skills of subconscious recognition of speech forms at the morphological and syntactic level and their correlation with a certain meaning (grammatical listening skills); b) Skills of direct understanding of words and phrases (lexical listening skills); c) Skills of subconscious perception and differentiation of the sound side of speech: sounds, sound combinations, intonation (it is characteristic that in listening these skills cannot be called "pronouncing": after all, the listener does not pronounce, but perceives). Therefore, this principle can be safely considered as a gradual process of transition from the position "from complex to simple" to the position "from complex to less complex". This technique will allow students to practice their speech perception skills in such a way that after a certain time they will feel more confident when performing this type of work. This will help students to easily work with audio and video materials and perfectly cope with the task of listening.

Experimental work
The experimental practical part of this study is aimed at identifying: -The ratio (in a percentage) of the number of students in groups who completed and failed the task as a whole.
-The ratio of the number of students in groups who received different grades for the completed task.
-The overall dynamics of the results of the listening 2 groups of students were selected to conduct experimental work on the development of this method: Group 1 is a regular group that completes a task after listening to the text in the usual format in the classroom environment.
Group 2 is an experimental group that performs the task after passing four stages of this lesson in the elearning system.
After registration in the e-learning system, students from the experimental group receive a task and methodological recommendations for its implementation.
A limited amount of time is given to the English language skills training session. The task usually consists of four stages: Stage 1. Listening to a short segment of foreign language speech, where the speaker pronounces the text in the usual natural fast pace. Students listen to this text 3 times. The text is short and does not last more than 1 minute.
Stage 2. Listening to the same segment of foreign language speech, where the speaker now pronounces the same text, but slowly. Students also listen to this text 3 times.
Stage 3. Students write down on a piece of paper the listening segment behind the speaker, speaking at a slow pace. Stage 4. Students are shown the original text of the listened segment so that they can compare it with their own recording. Then, they listen to the text spoken at a fast pace three times for understanding each word spoken.
Only after this, students complete control tasks on listening to the listened text.
The peculiarity of each listening exercise is that each text offers 3-4 new unfamiliar words, phrases, or grammatical structures. Between the third and fourth stages, students work on understanding the meanings of new lexical and grammatical units, where several exercises are offered to fix the lexical and grammatical material.
The main problem in this type of listening is undoubtedly the fact that almost all audio and video files have only one version of the speech rate. Therefore, there are only two ways to solve this problem. The first and, as it seems, the most obvious is to turn to a native speaker who would read the text at a normal natural pace and at a slow pace. A slow speed is usually half of the normal tempo.
It is also difficult to find a native speaker who meets certain language norms and dialects. It absolutely excludes those native speakers who are not indigenous, representatives of certain diasporas, people who speak rare dialects, as well as representatives of other nationalities living in the English language space.
The second method is to search the Internet for ready-made audio and video materials, which have an option to select the speech tempo. Usually six speech rates are provided: 0.5 x, 0.75 x, normal, 1.25 x, 1.5 x, 2x. Audio and video materials on the Internet are presented in a fairly large volume. Here one can select and create a large background and video library of materials for working with students. Depending on the general level of training of students, one can choose a certain pace of speech. It is usually selected between two options: normal and 0.5 x.
Both groups had 10 listening sessions each. Ten students attended each group. The video was selected from the site https://www.ted.com where on the basis was suggested to view the material at a normal speed for both groups and finally at a speed of 0.5 x for the experimental group. After the procedure of two types of listening, students were given a test task where they had to answer 10 questions, choosing one of the four options of the proposed answers. For each correct answer, the student received one point. The results of the first session are shown in Table 1. Starting from the fifth session, students of the experimental group were asked to view the material at first also at a normal speed, and then at a speed of 0.75 x, thus complicating the task. The results of the fifth session are shown in Table 2.  Dmitry Zhdanov, Pavel Baklanov / Proceedings IFTE-20202905 The decrease in the average score in the experimental group is predictably due to an increase in the rate of the second listening. The average indicator of the usual group remained at the same level.
By the tenth session, students in the experimental group had improved their performance, which is shown in the following table, which reflects the results of the ninth session. We also see an increase in the average score in the regular group. This is due to the constant practice of listening. Undoubtedly, if one continues to conduct listening training, the results will undoubtedly be higher. However, to complete the experiment, the tenth lesson was conducted under the same conditions for all groups of students, i.e., the students of the regular group and the experimental group listened to the text 2 times at normal speed and completed the corresponding tasks on the listened material. The results of the tenth session are shown in Table 4.

Discussions
As a result of the experiment, we can conclude that the work on listening on the principle of "from complex to simple" improved the final performance of students in the experimental group in comparison with the average performance of students in the regular group, who were put on an equal footing at the final tenth session by 23 percent.

Conclusion
The use of an alternative approach to solving the problem of learning to understand English speech using elearning resources gives grounds to claim that in the conditions of distance learning, this method helps to increase the level of perception of foreign language speech and fixes listening skills. Work on listening on the principle of "from complex to simple" undoubtedly has a great future and will be improved further.
This is a new revolutionary idea that will be widely discussed. It also will find many supporters who will offer their own methods for its development and improvement. The results of experimental work on these types of speech activity clearly showed that the usual methods of work are no longer relevant and in our age of the digital generation, all the old things are going into the past. It is necessary to find new ways, relying on advanced technologies and work out new methods of learning a foreign language, in particular, one of its important aspects is teaching the perception of foreign language speech. The proposed method increases speech perception by 23 percent. And this is only for 10 sessions. Undoubtedly, the average performance will be much higher with a longer cycle of sessions. Moreover, this is the subject of further work in this direction. This is just the beginning. We can assume that of course, there will be opponents of this method, and a hot discussion on this topic can start. And this is great, because the more representatives of science will participate in this discussion, the more progressive ideas and suggestions for improving the quality of training listening comprehension can be adopted in the future.
We should not exclude the practical significance of this work, which consists in the fact that these methodological recommendations and tasks can be applied by faculty members and teachers of foreign languages at different stages of training listening comprehension. The results of this work can contribute to the further resolution of many problems related to training listening comprehension, especially in the context of distance learning when working on various platforms.