Tetiana Maslova

National Technical University of Ukraine

„Igor Sikorsky Kyiv Polytechnic Institute“
(Kyiv, Ukraine)

ESP LISTENING SKILLS

Key words: listening skills, top-down listening strategy, bottom-up listening
strategy, listening sub-skills, listening tasks, ESP (English for Specific Purposes).

Listening is the receptive skill that we use the most in everyday and
professional life. In fact, listening accounts for about 40 per cent of the time we spend
communicating, which is significantly more than we do speaking (35%), reading
(16%), or writing (9%) [4; 8]. Moreover, listening is the underlying skill that helps
master a foreign language and thus require proper attention in the teaching practice.
The main difficulty with developing good listening skills is the fact that it
involves understanding spoken language, which is different from written language in
many ways. First of all, spoken language disappears as soon as the speaker finishes
talking, and it is often impossible to ask for repeat. Also, spoken language is typically
not very well organized, containing incomplete sentences, single words, frequent
changes of topic, and so on. Finally, we might need to listen to a wide range of text
types, for example, lectures, announcements, interviews, news reports, all being
produced at a different speed and in various accents. As a result, one should rely a lot
on intonation, gestures and facial expression of the speaker as well as on the context
of interaction to get a better comprehension of the spoken language.
For that reason, it is essential to differentiate between a number of listening
sub-skills, and concern yourself with both top-down and bottom-up listening practice.
The difference between top-down and bottom-up listening strategies is that the
former suggests focusing on the general meaning of the message, while the latter
involves understanding at a sound or word level. As such, most common top-down
listening activities include comprehension questions, predicting, guessing, listing,
sequencing information, and require drawing on one’s background knowledge of the
listening context, topic, speakers, etc. Bottom-up listening activities, on the other
hand, are made to pay close attention to particular details of the language used in the
listening text, such as the pronunciation, grammar, and vocabulary, so that one needs
to separate the stream of speech into individual words, and decode the sound signal
bit by bit [7; 9].
Most ESP practitioners tend to prefer top-down activities to bottom-up ones,
saying that the ability to recognize the topic and the key words of a listening situation
will help the listener cope with unfamiliar vocabulary or grammar structures it may
contain. However, in real-life listening, we have to use both strategies, relying more
on either of these two, depending on the reasons for listening. Bottom-up approach to
listening is data-driven, while top-down approach is a conceptually-driven process. In
fact, different cognitive skills are involved when we start decoding and interpreting

38
the listening text, coming in the end to adequate comprehension of the information
we hear and preparing a relevant response. Therefore, both top-down and bottom-up
strategies of processing the aural input must be practised in the foreign language
classroom, fostering the development of different listening sub-skills.
There have been made several attempts to design an overall taxonomy of
listening sub-skills [2, p. 63], and probably the most detailed classification of
listening micro-skills, which is built on various communicative purposes for listening
in a social action, include:
- listening for gist (listen for global understanding, that is to understand
the main idea);
- listening for specific information (listen to find out some details, key
words, etc.);
- listening in detail (listen to understand as much information as possible);
- listening for mood/ attitude (listen to identify the attitude, feeling, or
mood the speaker is expressing);
- inferring meaning from context (guess the meaning of an unknown word
by using the information in a situation);
- predicting content (use clues or prior general knowledge to make it
easier to understand what you hear);
- relating the listening text to the social and situational context;
- recognizing the communicative function of the listening text;
- intensive listening (listen to focus primarily on how language is used) [2;
3; 10; 11].
It should be noted here that ESP listening sub-skills are typically integrated
skills in the sense that they are combined with one or more other language skills. For
example, in the academic settings listening to lectures is usually accompanied with
notes-taking, and in the business meetings listeners must be able not only to listen
critically, but also respond quickly and accurately [3, p. 62].
In this respect, it is advisable to design wisely the successive steps in an ESP
listening lesson. Pre-listening stage must prepare the learners for what they are going
to hear by activating their schemata to predict the content of the listening text. At
while-listening stage the learners are exposed to the aural input to fulfil a certain task
– listen for gist, listen for specific information, or listen in detail. They can be
encouraged to check their answers in pairs or groups, and listen to the recording for
the second time, either to check themselves and get more confidence, or to answer
more detailed questions. In any case, it is important that the learners should be given
a different task to do every time they listen again to the same recording. The final
post-listening stage lies in checking answers in class, discussing language difficulties,
such as particular grammar, phonology, unknown vocabulary, functional language,
etc., and completing a follow-on speaking or writing activity as a response to what
has been heard and discussed [11, p. 60-61].
In general, pre-listening activities may include discussions of questions or
statements, doing quizzes, analysing/ ordering pictures, making predictions, and
brainstorming. It might be reasonable to pre-teach some of the vocabulary (meaning,

39
pronunciation, form) as well. Among while-listening activities one can find checking
predictions, matching/ ordering pictures, answering general questions (listening for
gist); finding specific data (e.g. names, dates, countries, numbers), sequencing, gap-
filling (listening for specific information); True-False statements, open questions,
multiple choice questions (listening in detail). As for post-listening tasks, they can
focus on language (vocabulary, grammar, phonology, functional language) and/ or
development of productive skills (speaking/ writing), leading to such activities as role
plays, discussions/ debates, projects, writing a review, summary, essay, report, etc.
[6].
Another thing to consider is the fact that compared to general English classes
ESP lessons tend to be based more on practical tasks and authentic listening materials
are vital. Therefore, both ESP practitioners and learners must have access to various
technologies, like corpora and audiovisual media on the internet, that offer plenty of
opportunities to practise listening skills relevant to academic or workplace-related
demands. What is more important, these resources can be employed for increasing
the pragmatic awareness of often subconscious rules of discourse management and
sociolinguistic language use in academic and professional communication contexts
[5]. In this connection, authentic videos (interviews, news reports, conference talks,
lectures) are considered as the most useful source for ESP listening comprehension
activities as they represent the behaviour of speakers and can be analysed in terms of
verbal and non-verbal means of communication [1; 6].
Given the diversity in the range of ESP learning needs and discourse
conventions, a further research must be certainly done to gain a deeper understanding
about the development of ESP listening skills but the present overview may serve as
a helpful tool in designing a productive ESP lesson.

References:
1. Bajrami L., Ismaili M. The Role of Video Materials in EFL Classrooms / Lumturie
Bajrami, Merita Ismaili // Procedia – Social and Behavioral Sciences. – Vol. 232. –
2016. – P. 502-506.
2. Barta É. Test takers’ listening comprehension sub-skills and strategies / Éva Barta
// WoPaLP, Vol. 4, 2010. – P. 59-85.
3. Goh C. C. M. ESP and Listening / Christine C. M. Goh // The Handbook of
English for Specific Purposes (eds B. Paltridge and S. Starfield). – John Wiley &
Sons, Ltd, Chichester, 2012. – P. 55-76.
4. Hedge T. Teaching and Learning in the Language Classroom: A guide to current
ideas about the theory and practice of English language teaching / Tricia Hedge //
Foreign Language Study. – OUP Oxford, 2000. – 464 p.
5. Maslova T. Developing pragmatic competence for professional communication /
Tetiana Maslova // Емпіричні дослідження для реформування освіти в Україні:
Збірник матеріалів І Міжнародної наукової конференції Української асоціації
дослідників освіти (11 лютого 2017 р.) / За ред. С.Щудло, О.Заболотної,
О.Ковальчук. – Київ – Дрогобич : ТзОВ «Трек-ЛТД», 2017. – С. 109-112.

40
6. Milovanova N. V. Video as a means of developing ESP listening skills of law
students / N. V. Milovanova // Язык науки и техники в современном мире :
материалы V Междунар. науч.-практ. конф. (Омск, 14 апр. 2016 г.). – Омск :
Изд-во ОмГТУ, 2016. – P. 227-232.
7. Morley C. Listening: Top down and bottom up / Catherine Morley // Teaching
English. British Council. BBC. – 5 September, 2007. [Electronic resource]. Access
mode: https://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/article/listening-top-down-bottom
8. Shlyakhtina О. Listening skills acquisition in ESP course / О. Shlyakhtina //
Науковий вісник ХДУ. Серія «Лінгвістика». : зб. наук. наук. праць. – Херсон :
ХДУ, 2015. – Вип.22. – С. 218-222.
9. Tennant A. Listening matters: Top-down and bottom-up listening/ Adrian Tennant
// Onestopenglish. Teaching tips. – Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 2000-2017. [Electronic
resource]. Access mode: http://www.onestopenglish.com/skills/listening/teaching-
tips/listening-matters/listening-matters-top-down-and-bottom-up-
listening/154567.article
10. Weir C. Understanding and developing language tests / Cyril J. Weir // New
York: Prentice Hall, 1993. – 203 p.
11. Wilson J.J. How to teach listening / J.J. Wilson // Pearson Longman, 2008. –
192 p.

41