CURRENT STATUS OF THE RESEARCH INTO DEVELOPING STUDENTS’ LISTENING COMPETENCE

Language teachers are the quality of their professional preparation, the degree of their language proficiency and the development of their autonomous learning skills which should promote teachers' personal and professional growth after graduation. Also, it is clear that listening competence is an important component of teachers' communicative, professional and intercultural competence. However, absence of authentic foreign language environment, lack of repeated and systematic listening practice, low motivation, psychological barriers are the obstacles on the way to developing proficiency in listening. Therefore, the issue of developing students' listening competency and autonomy with the help of fiction audiobooks has been investigated here. Purpose. The purpose of this article is to explore recent research into listening competence, focusing on some key theoretical and practical aspects in search of the effective ways of incorporating audiobooks into foreign language teaching practice at universities. Results. Examining the data drawn from recent research into listening competence, we have explored the possible ways of its development through fiction in audiobook format. We have found that differentiated approach should be used for organizing students' extra-curricular work with audiobooks. Following this approach, students have an opportunity to work individually, in pairs or in groups; to choose the books they like; to fulfill differentiated tasks; to get more objective assessment of one's achievements. We have also defined a set of fundamental principles which should be applied. They are the following: training students to understand explicit and implicit information of short stories and developing the necessary skills; integrating skills work; developing motivational willingness before listening; discussion as an effective way to control the depth of understanding; tests as an economical and rational way to organize and control the listening process; taking into account the context of the story (exogenous/endogenous) which demands from students special or universal background knowledge and some additional work at pre-listening stage; developing linguacultural and sociocultural competence by means of audiobooks; developing students' autonomy and metacognitive skills; developing useful strategies for successful listening of fiction audiobooks; taking into account students' emotional tension which can reduce the degree of understanding in class and giving them an opportunity to listen to the same books at home; the importance of speaking and development of interpretative skills, which are important indicators of students' communicative competence; note taking as a way to concentrate attention, unload students' memory, as a written support for further speaking; replicating narrators as a way to approximate native speakers or develop bottom-up processing skills; suggesting 2 main ways of overcoming complicated factors: accumulating listening experience by regular practice (25-30 minutes a day) and working out some techniques which should be directed at dealing with various difficulties. Originality. The ways of facilitating students to develop listening competence through fiction audiobooks are defined in this article. Conclusion. Nowadays fiction audiobooks are not widespread in Ukrainian universities. However, on the basis of our research findings, an effective methodological procedure by means of fiction audiobooks can be developed and used to enhance students' listening skills. Moreover, with the help of audiobooks students can be trained how to use them autonomously for their own personal and professional development. We therefore tend to conclude that audiobooks are perspective educational tools.