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?

Task:
• Discuss this question in your group
 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.
Characteristics of the listening process
Task:

In groups, discuss the following question:

What is the difference between reading and

listening?
 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
Characteristics of the listening process
• Spontaneity
• Context
• Visual clues Active listening?!!
• Listener’s response
• Speaker’s adjustment
(Ur 1996:106-7)
 The listening process
• Listening is a two or three stage process
1. Recognition
2. Utilisation

These stages can be summarised in three

questions:
3. ‘What did he say? (recognising)
4. What did he mean when he said X?
5. What did he intend when he said X? (utilising –
applying to the context)’
 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)
 Types of listening
1. Selective listening – for a specific piece of information
2. Global listening – for overall gist
3. Intensive listening – for precise information and detail
(Ferguson, 2005b)

1. Transactional listening – to obtain new information

2. Interactional listening – to maintain social relationships
3. Critical listening – in academic contexts
4. Recreational listening – for relaxation, entertainment
(Rost, 1990)
 Principles of teaching listening
• Focus on process
• Combine listening with other skills
• Focus on the comprehension of meaning
• Grade difficulty level appropriately
 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)
 Principles of teaching listening

• Pre-listening activities
• While listening activities
• Post-listening activities
 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
 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
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information
 While listening activities
• No response
• Tick boxes eg.
• Sequencing
• Act
• Draw
• Gap fill
• Take notes
 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...)
 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.

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