Developing listening skills

1. Developing listening skills

2. Listening experiences • Write a list of all the things you listened to in the last 24 hours. For example, watching news on TV last night, listening to voicemail.

3. Listening experiences • Decide which of your listening experiences: • involved you speaking as well as listening, i.e., interactive, as opposed to non-interactive. • Involved listening to a speaker who was physically present • Involved listening for specific information • Involved listening more for pleasure or entertainment • Required you to listen closely and attentively • Allowed a less attentive style of listening

4. Listening experiences • Rate these types of listening in terms of their difficulty for a second language learner. • Watching the news on TV • Listening to the news on the radio. • Listening to a song on the radio • Talking about the news with a friend face to face. • Talking about the news with a friend on the phone • Listening to a recording of the news in the classroom.

5. Comprehension • Listen to two (unrelated) texts, Text A and Text B, and answer the questions. • Did you understand all the words in the texts? • Did you understand the overall meaning of the texts?

6. Comprehension Listen again and answer all these questions. • What was different about each text the second time? Were the texts easier to understand? • What factors make comprehension easier or more difficult? • What are the implications of this activity on listening and reading in the classroom? • What can the teacher do to make comprehension easier?

7. Comprehension • Comprehension depends on a number of factors and is not simply a case of ‘understanding every word’. • In the first text, first version you probably understood every word but unsure whet the text was about. You lacked the background information – the top-down knowledge. • In the second text, first version you were unfamiliar with some of the words. You lacked bottom-up knowledge. But you had a clear idea of the situation and so could guess some of the missing linguistic information. • Comprehension results from the interaction of both top-down and bottom-up information.

8. Comprehension How can we help learners before they read/listen? • Establish the general situation, topic, context of the text (to activate top-down knowledge) • Provide help with individual words (bottom-up knowledge), i.e. pre-teach vocabulary

9. Listening texts and tasks • Match each listening text type with an appropriate task. • 1. a,c,g • 2. d,g • 3. f,j • 4. a,b • 5. a • 6. a,f,h,i,k • 7. a,e,g • 8. a,d,e,h

10. A listening lesson • Look at the course book extract and identify the purpose of the activities marked with an arrow. • Activity 1a: (pre-listening): activating interest and background knowledge; also pre-teaching vocabulary. • Activity 1b (while listening): gist listening; gaining overall familiarity with content. • 2a (while listening): Detailed listening. • Activity 3a: using transcript to match spoken and written texts, and resolve problems of understanding (re-listening); focus on one feature of the spoken text (in this case sentence stress: post-listening) • Activity 3b: application of these features (post-listening) • Activity 3c: checking (re-listening)

11. A listening lesson • Put these stages of a listening task into a logical order. There is no single correct order all the time. But there is a sort of ‘default’ order. • As you do this prepare to explain the rationale for each stage.

12. A listening lesson • d. activating interest and background knowledge helps understanding. • e. pre-teaching vocabulary helps understanding • f. setting a task provides a motivation to listen; more general tasks precede more specific ones. • b. more specific tasks, requiring more intensive listening, follow more extensive tasks. • c. following the transcript helps solve residual problems of understanding • a. the text is used as a source of language focus, but only after it has been thoroughly understood.

13. A listening lesson • Pre-listening: d, e • While-listening: f, b, c • Post-listening: a

14. Classroom application • Have a look at a listening skills lesson in your course book. Now, can you identify the reason for each stage?