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In Listening classes, students are usually given practice in listening but they are not actually taught listening. Practice is not enough. Research and case studies have told us many things about how listening should be taught. But often, this knowledge has not made the jump into classroom practice. While many classes are based on the idea of giving students lots of practice with English, research tells us that we also need to teach listening. In addition to giving students plenty of listening practice. We should also break the skill of listening into micro-skill components and make sure that our students are aware of what they need to know to understand how to listen to English.
A Teacher's Checklist
Students need to know and understand: how words link together (liaison) how vowels weaken (the central vowel) how sounds mix together (assimilation) how sounds disappear (elision) how syllables disappear (ellipsis) how helping sounds are used between vowel sounds (intrusion) how intonation helps with conversational turn taking (intonation) how stress signals new information (prominence) how to use grammar to help guess meaning (strategies) how to use discourse knowledge to help guess meaning (strategies) how to use knowledge of intonation and stress to guess meaning (strategies) Do your students know all these features of natural English? They should. Everyone knows that many Japanese say that 'listening' is their weak point with English. There is a very simple reason for this. Most Japanese students have never been taught how to listen to English. They have had practice but they have never actually been taught or given guidance about how to listen to English. We, along with many of you, want to change this
Our knowledge of the language system includes our knowledge of words, how these words are properly put in order (syntax or grammar), how these words are said in connected streams (phonology), how these words are strung together in longer texts (discourse) and so on. Using the language system involves how we apply this knowledge of the language system to understand or convey meaning and how we apply particular skills to understanding and conveying meaning.
The Listening Skills (an all too often forgotten skill set)
Listening skills are often divided into two groups: bottom up listening skills and top down listening skills Bottom up listening skills, or bottom up processing, refers to the decoding process, the direct decoding of language into meaningful units, from sound waves through the air, in through our ears and into our brain where meaning is decoded. To do this students need to know the code. How the sounds work and how they string together and how the codes can change in different ways when they're strung together. And most students have never been taught how English changes when it's strung together in sentences. Top-down processing refers to how we use our world knowledge to attribute meaning to language input; how our knowledge of social convention helps us understand meaning. These are the skills that listening teachers should be teaching in their classes but all too often are not. (Unless of course you are already using our listening textbook!!!) To offer a quote: "An understanding of the role of bottom-up and top-down processes in listening is central to any theory of listening comprehension" (Richards, 1990:50). We agree.
before they can learn it. And as such, we need to help our students notice language points. Teachers need to teach. "There is support in the literature for the hypothesis that attention is required for all learning. Learners need to pay attention to input and pay particular attention to whatever aspect of the input (phonology, morphology, pragmatics, discourse, etc) that you are concerned to learn" (Schmidt: 1995) An ideal listening class should thus provide both practice and instruction. Students need practice in listening for meaning and also some instruction about how to do so effectively. "Classroom data from a number of studies offer support for the view that form focused instruction and corrective feedback provided within the context of communicative programs are more effective in promoting second language learning than programs which are limited to a virtually exclusive emphasis on either accuracy or fluency". (Lightbrown & Spada)