Teaching Listening

Teaching Listening

Teaching Listening

• Why does listening seem so difficult?
• Characteristics of the listening process
• Types of listening
• Principles of teaching listening
• Pre-listening activities
• While-listening activities
• Post-listening activities

Why does listening seem so difficult?

• Task:
• Discuss this question in your group

Why does listening seem so difficult?

• Students:
• Quickly forget what is heard.
• Do not recognise words they know.
• Understand the words but not intended message.
• Neglect the next part when thinking about meaning.
• Unable to form a mental representation from words heard.
• Do not understand subsequent parts of input because of earlier problems.

Characteristics of the listening process

• Task:
• In groups, discuss the following question:
• What is the difference between reading and listening?

Differences?

• You have just one go at it
• The presence of stress, rhythm, intonation etc
• Characteristics of fast, natural speech (e.g. weak forms)
• Often the need to process and respond immediately
• Often visual clues but also other noise
• Information is often less densely packed and more repetitive than in reading
• Natural redundancy
• Less complex in grammatical and discourse structure

Characteristics of the listening process

• Spontaneity
• Context
• Visual clues
• Listener’s response
• Speaker’s adjustment
• (Ur 1996:106-7)

• Active listening?!!

The listening process

• Listening is a two or three stage process
• Recognition
• Utilisation
• These stages can be summarised in three questions:
• ‘What did he say? (recognising)
• What did he mean when he said X?
• What did he intend when he said X? (utilising – applying to the context)’

The listening process

• Bottom-up processing – we use our linguistic knowledge and ability to process acoustic signals, which we first decode into phonemes, then words, phrases, and finally sentences
• Top-down processing – the speaker’s meaning is interpreted from expectations based on the context, world knowledge etc
• (Hedge, 2000)

Types of listening

• Selective listening – for a specific piece of information
• Global listening – for overall gist
• Intensive listening – for precise information and detail
• (Ferguson, 2005b)
• Transactional listening – to obtain new information
• Interactional listening – to maintain social relationships
• Critical listening – in academic contexts
• Recreational listening – for relaxation, entertainment (Rost, 1990)

Principles of teaching listening

• Focus on process
• Combine listening with other skills
• Focus on the comprehension of meaning
• Grade difficulty level appropriately

Principles of teaching learning

• Look at the text from Headway Upper Intermediate (p86). Think about the following:
• What is the general purpose of pre-listening work?
• What are the specific purposes of the tasks in 1,2 and 3?
• Why are the students given a task while listening?
• What roles must the teacher perform during this listening work?
• (Hedge, 2000)

Principles of teaching listening

• Pre-listening activities
• While listening activities
• Post-listening activities

Pre listening activities

• RATIONALE:
• Motivating students by making the topic relevant and interesting
• Activating existing knowledge for new knowledge to be built upon
• Introducing key vocabulary and key structures, that students need in order to understand the text

Pre-listening activities

• Predicting (eg. “What are these people doing? What are they saying to each other?”)
• Setting the scene - introduce people/ places (activating schemata)
• Gist listening
• Listening for specific information

While listening activities

• No response
• Tick boxes eg.
• Sequencing
• Act
• Draw
• Gap fill
• Take notes

Final thoughts

• Don’t expect learners to remember more than a native speaker would!
• Testing understanding rather than memory
• Think more about the process than the product (wrong answers more interesting...)

References

• Ferguson, G. (2005) Lecture Handout: Listening and Teaching Listening. MA Module: Language Teaching Methodology. University of Sheffield.
• Hedge, T. (2000) Teaching and Learning in the Language Classroom. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Rost, M. (1990) Listening in Language Learning. London: Longman.

Post-listening activities

• Multiple-choice questions (eg.)
• Answering questions
• Note-taking and gap-filling
• Dictogloss (preparation, dictation, reconstruction, correcting)
• Role play
• Debate
• Discussion