Unit 9

1. Unit 9 Teaching Listening

2. Teaching objectives • Be able to understand why listening seems so difficult • Be able toknow what we listen to in everyday life • Be able tomaster the characteristics of the listening process in real life • Be able tomaster the principles and models of teaching listening • Be able toknow about the common activities in teaching listening

3. Why does listening seem so difficult? • Reflection: In your English learning experience, did you find listening more difficult than the other three skills? Can you think of any reason?

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

5. Reasons for the problems • We have incorrect pronunciation. • We have inadequate vocabulary and grammatical comprehension. • We lack the culture; • We have no proper listening strategies and listening habits. • We have less listening practice in classroom and in real life. • We are used to learn the foreign language by reading instead of listening and speaking. • Listening is often neglected in language teaching for various reasons. • There is a misunderstanding of listening training.

6. What do we listen to in everyday life? • In reality we listen to far more things through telephone conversation, daily conversation, radio news, instruction, lessons or lectures, watching television, seeing movies, selling and buying things, interviewing with someone, listening to songs ,dealing with all kinds of things, etc.

7. Characteristics of the listening process • Spontaneity • Context • Visual clues • Listener’s response • Speaker’s adjustment

8. Principles for teaching listening • Focus on process • Combining listening with the other skills • Focusing on comprehension of meaning • Grading difficulty level appropriately (discussion)

9. Task 5: Suppose you are teaching a lower intermediate class of middle school students. You want to give them some listening practice. The following listening materials are available. • Questions: 1.Which texts would you choose? 2.In what order would you use them?

10. Models for teaching listening • Bottom-up model:In the bottom-up model, listening comprehension is believed to start with sound and meaning recognition. Listeners construct meaning of what they hear based on the sound they hear. This process of listening expects the listener to have a very effective short-term memory as they have to make sense of every sound in order to figure out the meaning of words phrases, and structures.

11. Top-down model: In the top-sown model, listening for gist and making use of the contextual clues and background knowledge to construct meaning are emphasized. In such a case, listeners can understand better if they know something about the speaker, the setting, the topic and purpose of the talk.

12. Classroom listening-teaching stages and activities • pre-listening • while-listening • post-listening.

13. Objectives of pre-listening • To motivate the listeners • To smooth away linguistic difficulty such as key words and key structures to make listening activities easier. • To activate students’ prior knowledge

14. Activities of pre-listening • Predicting • Setting the scene • Listening for gist: • Listening for special formation

15. Objectives of while-listening • To get the right information • To understand the speakers’ intention and attitude • To obtain the main idea of the material • To train listening skills

16. Activities of while-listening • No specific responses • Listen and tick • Listen and sequence • Listen and act • Listen and draw • Listen and fill • Listen and take notes

17. Post-listening • The post-listening stage is where the teacher can determine how well the students have understood what they listened to.

18. Objectives of post-listening • To consolidate what has been learned • To apply what has been learned • To check what has been learnt

19. Activities of post-listening • Multiple choice questions • Answering questions • Note-taking and gap-filling • Dictogloss

20. KEY PIONTS • the characteristics of the listening process in real life • the principles of teaching listening • models of teaching listening