DBO – TEACHING LISTENING

It is difficult for many students to concentrate on listening if they have little

interest in a topic. Therefore, as teachers, our job is to raise their interest and
curiosity about the topic, to bring them into the topic, and to make them more
willing to listen. So there are some pre-listening activities. In the first week, we
mentioned these activities and their aims => Using pictures: to contextualize
the listening text, to motivate learners to want to listen, to arouse their curiosity.
Personalizing: to personalize the topic by bringing in a real-life story (because
we have already known that learning is more than a classroom experience), to
get them find something related to them and to the topic, to arouse their
interest, to motivate them. Predicting vocabulary: to brainstorm, to interest
and motivate Ss, to give them a reason for listening, to foster critical thinking.
Once Ss know the topic, they predict words that they think they will hear and
have an idea about the text by looking at the vocabulary items. Predicting
facts: to intrigue/interest learners, to set the stage for listening, to contextualize
the listening text, to activate schemata, to get them involved in the topic. This
step sets the context, but if we go straight in to the listening by just saying
“Listen to this.”, the students have no time to activate their knowledge.
Practicing tenses: to teach grammatical patterns, to practise what they have
learned, to give learners a reason for listening, to discover the way a text is
linked together, to motivate them to listen.

Receptive and productive skills were also touched on in the first week.
Reading and listening are receptive skills, which means we are required to
receive something whereas writing and speaking skills are productive, which
means we are required to produce something. We also talked about some
similarities between warming-up activities for reading and listening: Both deal
with a text. Activities use any of four skills and words from the texts to be read or
listened to, and involve guessing or predicting about the topic.

Moreover, we touched many points we should take into consideration. As

we did in teaching reading and vocabulary process, again while teaching
listening, we should give our students a purpose so that they know what we will
do or what we are listening for. Afterwards, we can create a context for a
listening passage by telling Ss the topic and asking them to predict what the text
is about, using pictures, videos, dramatization, storytelling and some of the
vocabulary items to introduce the topic. Another job of ours is to reduce Ss’
worries and negative feelings about listening in the class and to help them feel
comfortable.

We also dealt with while-listening activities and their aims. These aims are
listening for; the gist, specific information, checking answers, checking mistakes,
dictation, re-ordering a jumbled dialogue, taking notes, completing a picture and
matching pictures with descriptions. We should select listening activities
according to our purpose.

In the second week, we discussed some focus questions and concluded

that it is advantageous to make short responses in listening activities as Ss can
listen and respond easily at the same time and drawing-matching responses
allow Ss to concentrate on listening while it is disadvantageous to make long
responses since it causes Ss to miss a part of the tape and looking at other
questions.

In addition, we mentioned some teaching listening techniques, scored

these techniques and talked about their advantages and disadvantages.

Munise ÖZTÜRK