TEACHING LISTENING

In real-life, our students will have to use a combination of the two types
of listening processes, with more emphasis on top-down or bottom-up
listening depending on their reasons for listening. However, the two types
of listening can also be practised separately, as the skills involved are
quite different.
Top-down listening means you ask your students to predict the content
of a listening activity beforehand, using information about the topic or
situation, pictures, or key words. This activity encourages students to use
their knowledge of the topic to help them understand the content. This is
an essential skill given that, in a real-life listening situation, even
advanced learners are often likely to come across some unknown
vocabulary. Context and co-text should help to guess the meaning of the
unknown word, or understand the general idea without getting distracted
by it.

Fig.1

Teaching in the Digital Age: training adult learning providers to develop online blended learning modules. Project ID: AD2010_1a-22838

Or listen and agree/disagree.

Fig.2
You can check your understanding with comprehension questions,

Fig.3
Teaching in the Digital Age: training adult learning providers to develop online blended learning modules. Project ID: AD2010_1a-22838

or with True/False questions

Fig.4

However, if learners understand very few words from the incoming signal,
even knowledge about the context may not be sufficient for them to
understand what is happening, and they can easily get lost. For low-level
learners this may simply mean the lack of vocabulary but higher-level
students can easily fail to recognise known words in the stream of fast
connected speech. Bottom-up listening activities that teach the
language content first can help learners to understand enough linguistic
elements of what they hear to then be able to use their top-down skills to
fill in the gaps.

Teaching in the Digital Age: training adult learning providers to develop online blended learning modules. Project ID: AD2010_1a-22838

Fig. 5
The post-listening task asks students to think and take notes on the topic
for face-to-face meeting.

Fig.6

Now students proceed with some questions which they have to find
answers to. Clicking on the check icon gives feedback if students have
understood correctly.

Teaching in the Digital Age: training adult learning providers to develop online blended learning modules. Project ID: AD2010_1a-22838

Fig.7
As the idea is to make students to see the big picture, i.e. to provide
comprehension of the text, the ROUND IT OFF task gives an opportunity
to listen to the video again and also read the script. This also enables to
see the spelling of the words and look them up in the dictionary, if
necessary.

Fig.8

Teaching in the Digital Age: training adult learning providers to develop online blended learning modules. Project ID: AD2010_1a-22838

The round off task can be used for building and recycling vocabulary.

Fig.9

Adapted from:
http://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/articles/listening

Further reading
1. Anne Anderson and Tony Lynch (1988). Listening. Oxford University
Press
2. Jack Richards, Designing instructional materials for teaching
listening comprehension, in The Language Teaching Matrix,
Cambridge, 1990
3. Mary Underwood (1989). Teaching Listening. Longman
4. Penny Ur (1984), Teaching Listening Comprehension, Cambridge.
5. Magnus Wilson. Discovery Listening improving perceptual
processing. ELT Journal Volume 57/4 (October 2003).

Teaching in the Digital Age: training adult learning providers to develop online blended learning modules. Project ID: AD2010_1a-22838