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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?.

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Teaching Listening

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  1. Teaching Listening

  2. 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

  3. Why does listening seem so difficult? Task: • Discuss this question in your group

  4. 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.

  5. Characteristics of the listening process Task: In groups, discuss the following question: What is the difference between reading and listening?

  6. 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

  7. Characteristics of the listening process • Spontaneity • Context • Visual clues • Listener’s response • Speaker’s adjustment (Ur 1996:106-7) Active listening?!!

  8. 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)’

  9. 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)

  10. 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)

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

  12. 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)

  13. Principles of teaching listening • Pre-listening activities • While listening activities • Post-listening activities

  14. 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

  15. 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

  16. While listening activities • No response • Tick boxes eg. • Sequencing • Act • Draw • Gap fill • Take notes

  17. 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...)

  18. 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. 18

  19. Post-listening activities • Multiple-choice questions (eg.) • Answering questions • Note-taking and gap-filling • Dictogloss (preparation, dictation, reconstruction, correcting) • Role play • Debate • Discussion 19

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