On specificity of teaching listening comprehension at higher school classes of English

The article is aimed at discussing the aspects of teaching listening comprehension in the English language teaching classroom. The attention as drawn to the following components connected with the skills of successful listening: adequate speech perception based on the knowledge of English phonetics; prosody as the means of oral speech structure organization; listeners‘ background knowledge providing adequate understanding of the reported message. The work with the students in the above mentioned areas is considered to be an important condition for successful listening comprehension competence.