"Listening Strategies" in: The tesol encyclopedia of English Language Teaching

 Pedagogical implications
Teachers’ role in understanding learners’ existing strategy use is of great impor-
tance, which requires teachers to be equipped with knowledge and understanding 
of the listening process to assist students’ listening practice effectively. Below are 
five key areas of learning support that teachers might like to consider.
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Listening Strategies
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First, learners need to be aware of their use of strategies and try to improve 
strategies for enhancing listening ability. Such awareness maybe directed towards 
the sequence of listening, differences between more‐and less‐proficient listeners, 
listening strategy instruction, and identification of listening problems. There is 
also the need to be equipped with a wide array of skills required for developing 
effective listening ability such as word recognition, guessing, comprehending, 
body language, conversation responses, language prosody such as rhythm, stress 
and intonation, and lip‐reading. Lip‐reading assists learners in connecting ges-
tures with sounds, which, according to (Nunan, 2002) is useful particularly for 
listening practice among lower‐level learners.
Second, understanding the text types, genres, and the nature of tasks is also 
a necessary step to consider. Teachers should be able to assist learners in devel-
oping appropriate mental and emotional responses to various tasks and 
listening focuses. When learners become aware of the nature of such demands, 
they will be in a better position to evaluate and manage the requirements of 
different tasks.
Third, teachers need to be aware of the negative attitudes and beliefs that learn-
ers hold, which could make progress difficult to achieve, such as expectation of 
perfection, self‐perception of low‐ability, awareness of peer pressure, and anxiety 
toward failure. Such thinking can be reduced through goal‐directedness, good 
attention, background knowledge of the listening content, and recommendation of 
appropriate strategies.
Fourth, learners need to be exposed to a wide range of listening materials that 
tap into many diverse listening strategies. Such materials should come in a vari-
ety of forms and levels, which may be coupled with teacher and peer input as 
well as interaction as an information source in combination with other skills. A 
useful method of listening development is extensive listening, which has origi-
nated from extensive reading, an approach that aims to improve a variety of 
reading skills through exposure to materials that approximately match profi-
ciency level. It is through exposure to extensive and various listening texts that 
learners gain opportunities to practice and refine their listening process, recog-
nize linguistic and lexical features, and increase cultural knowledge related to 
the target language.
Finally, a good understanding in students’ interactions with digital media is 
helpful in teachers’ decisions toward effective instruction of listening strategies. In 
today’s context, where communication technology and business environments 
have changed considerably in recent years, multimedia learning environments can 
assist second language students in the process of listening comprehension as well 
as the awareness of what skills can be employed for listening. For example, the use 
of pictorial annotations, that is, associating words with images, can support learn-
ers in the acquisition of new vocabulary that plays a role in comprehension 
(Fernández‐Pacheco, 2016).