Lesson 1 : teaching listening in english lessons plan

8. LISTENING SUB-SKILLS
There are various types of listening sub-skills to help listeners make sense of the listening text. Most commonly used listening sub-skills in language classrooms are:
Listening for-gist: listening to get a general idea
Listening for specific information: listening just to get a specific piece of information
Listening in detail: listening to every detail, and try to understand as much as possible
Listening to infer: listening to understand how listeners feel
Listening to questions and responding: listening to answer questions
Listening to descriptions: listening for a specific description
10. STAGES IN TEACHING LISTENING SKILLS
Vandergrift (1999) states that listening sequences improve students’ metacognitive abilities, especially in the first two years of language learning. These listening sequences may be divided into three stages as pre-listening, while-listening and post-listening and each of the three stages has its own specific purpose (Underwood, 1989). While-listening activities are the main activities of the listening tasks. Learners listen to the input and make decisions about the strategy to use according to the requirements of the task. Finally, in post-listening activities, learners discuss and evaluate their strategy choices and their effectiveness. Feedback is provided by self-evaluation and also group discussions (Guan, 2015)
Pre-listening
Pre-listening activities help to hear and give some clues about the activity expectations mostly by activating schemata. Imagine that you enter the classroom a little bit late and you see that the teacher has already started lecturing. Most probably, it will be difficult for you to grasp the topic and understand what is going on. Why do you think this happens? As you do not know the context and you do not have any prior knowledge about the context, the context will initially be inaccessible. Consequently, pre-listening activities serve the goal of ensuring students know what they need to know before they listen. Listeners need to know things like the speaker’s way of talking, the length of the text, the listener’s role, information about the topic, specialized vocabulary, and the relationship between listener and speaker (Wilson, 2008). A study conducted by Zohrabi et al. (2015) states that learners who are exposed to pre-listening activities performed better than those who did not take pre-listening activities. They also assert that pre-listening tasks are effective for students in understanding authentic English movies. Pre-listening activities activate the schemata and help students to predict what they will hear. Activating schemata means activating students’ prior knowledge. Activities to activate learners’ schemata might include brainstorming, visuals, realia, text and words, situations and opinions, ideas and facts. Brainstorming activities aim to produce ideas based on a topic or a problem. Brainstorming can be realized via a poster display in which students prepare a poster based on a given topic, brainwalking in which they walk around the classroom and enlarge the ideas collaboratively, boardwriting, in which they work in groups and they brainstorm about the same topic or a different one, and from one to many in which students work individually, take notes and then share the ideas with the group (Wilson, 2008). Besides brainstorming activities, visuals are also effective for pre-listening activities. There is an axiom saying “a picture is worth a thousand words. For example, a picture can be shown to students and they can predict the ongoing. Alternatively, a sequence of pictures can be given to students and they can tell a story related to the picture sequence.
Using realia is also helpful in activating schemata. For example a photo, a map, a brochure or any other object related to the listening text make students activate their prior knowledge and help them better understand the listening (Wilson, 2008).