Teaching Listening

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Teaching Listening

• Aims of this Lecture
• 1. Why is listening so difficult for students?
• 2. What do we listen to in everyday life?
• 3. What are the characteristics of the listening
  process?
• 4. What are the principles of teaching listening?
• 5. What are the common activities in teaching
  listening 

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Why does listening seem so difficult?

• It is becoming more and more necessary to
  understand spoken English in many situations,
  e.g. face-to-face conversations, telephone calls,
  business meetings, lectures, speeches,
  television, etc.
• Among the four skills, foreign language learners
  often complain that listening is the most
  difficult to acquire.

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Reasons why listening is often neglected in
language teaching

• Lack of teaching materials
• Lack of equipment
• Lack of training in how to use the equipment
• Listening is not included on many important
  tests
• Lack of real-life situations where language
  learners need to understand spoken English
• Lessons tend to test rather than to train
  student listening skills.

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Both listening and reading are receptive skills,
but listening can be more difficult than reading
because

• Different speakers produce the same sounds in
  different ways, e.g. dialects and accents,
  stress, rhythms, intonations, mispronunciations,
  etc.
• The listener has little/no control over the speed
  of the input of the spoken material
• The spoken material is often heard only once
  (unlike the reading material)

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• The listener cannot pause to work out the
  meaning
• Speech is more likely to be distorted by
  background noise (e.g. round the classroom) or
  the media that transmit sounds
• The listener sometimes has to deal simultaneously
  with another task while listening, e.g.
  note-taking, etc.

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What do we listen to in everyday life?

• Since we are teaching our students English not
  only to help them pass exams, but also to prepare
  them to use English in real life, it is important
  to think about the situations they will listen to
  English in real life and then think about the
  listening exercises we do in class.

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• Even at the beginning stage, we need to give our
  students a variety of listening exercises to
  prepare them for real life use of language.
• In most cases, the listening materials in the
  classroom are daily conversations or stories, but
  in reality we listen to far more things.
• e.g.

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• Telephone conversations about business
• Lessons or lectures given in English
• Instructions in English
• Watching movies in English
• Dealing with tourists
• Interviews with foreign-enterprises
• Socializing with foreigners
• Listening to English songs

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• Radio news in English
• Conversations with foreigners
• Watching television programmes in English
• Shop assistants who sell goods to foreigners
• International trade fairs
• Negotiations with foreign businessmen
• Hotel and restaurant services.

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Characteristics of the listening process

• It is important to understand the
  characteristics or process behind these listening
  situations so that we as teachers can design
  appropriate activities to help our students to
  develop effective listening habits and
  strategies.

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• Formal or informal?
• Rehearsed or non-rehearsed?
• Can the listener interact with the speaker nor
  not?
• Listening to English songs
• Socializing with foreigners
• Radio news in English
• Watching television programmes in English
• Negotiations with foreign businessmen
• Hotel and restaurant services

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Characteristics of the listening

• Spontaneity. We listen to people speaking
  spontaneously and informally without rehearsing
  what we are going to say ahead of time.
• Context. While listening, we know the
  relationship between the listener and the
  speaker. The situation helps to predict what we
  are going to hear.
• Visual clues. Facial expression, gestures, and
  other body language, and the surrounding
  environment, these visual clues help us predict
  and understand what we hear.

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• Listeners response. In a conversation, we can
  interrupt the speaker and ask for repetition or
  clarification.
• Speakers adjustment. The speaker can adjust the
  way of speaking according to the listeners
  reaction, e.g. he/she may rephrase or elaborate
  (to put it in more details).

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Principles of teaching listening

• Focus on process.
• Combine listening and speaking.
• Focus on comprehending meaning.
• Grade difficulty level appropriately.

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Focus on process

• Listening is not a passive activity. We must do
  many things to process information that we are
  receiving.
• Paying attention.
• Constructing meaningful messages in the mind by
  relating what we hear to what we already know
  (previous knowledge).
• So it is very important to design tasks the
  performance of which show how well the students
  have comprehended the listening material.

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Combine listening and speaking

• Two problems with the traditional listening
  classroom
• No opportunities to practise listening and
  speaking skills together
• The questions only test the students, rather than
  train the students how to listen or how to
  develop listening strategies.

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Focus on comprehending meaning

• In the traditional textbooks, the listening
  exercises are to test the students memory, not
  their listening comprehension.
• Psycholinguistic studies have shown that people
  do not remember the exact form of the message
  they hear, i.e., they dont remember what they
  hear word for word, rather, they remember the
  meaning.

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Grade difficulty level appropriately

• Three factors that may affect the difficulty
  level of listening tasks
• Type of language used
• Task or purpose in listening
• Context in which the listening occurs.

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Which of the following would you use for
intermediate middle school students? In what
order?

• A videotape of a talk by a native speaker about
  the school life of middle school students in the
  United States
• A live talk by a competent English-speaking
  Chinese psychologist about effective study
  habits
• An audiotape of an interview with a native
  English speaker talking about her experiences
  living in China
• An audiotape of the news from CRI (China Radio
  International)

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• The teacher need to evaluate the tasks provided
  in textbooks, adapt and design tasks to provide
  more variety. Variety does not only help students
  remain interested and motivated to learn, but
  also provide practise in the many types of
  listening situations which learners will
  encounter in real life.

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Bottom-up model

• The bottom-up mode of language processing
  involves the listener playing close attention to
  every detail of the language input. Bottom-up
  refers to that part of the aural comprehension
  process in which the understanding of the heard
  language is worked out proceeding from sounds to
  words to grammatical relationships to lexical
  meanings.
• E.g. Listening to a joke.

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Top-down model

• Top-down model involves the listener ability to
  bring prior information to bear on the task
  understanding the heard language.
• e.g. Listening to a conversation at a party.

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Three teaching stages

• Pre-listening activities
• While-listening activities
• Post-listening activities

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Pre-listening activities

• Predicting
• Setting the scene
• Listening for the gist
• Listening for specific information

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Predicting

• Good listeners are good predictors.
• There are many different activities that can be
  used to encourage students to predict the content
  of what they are about to hear.
• Visual aids are immensely helpful in aiding
  students comprehension. They attract students
  attention and help and encourage them to focus on
  the subject in hand

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Using pictures for prediction

• In the beginning the students may have difficulty
  in predicting. In this case the teacher can help
  them by asking leading questions.
• e.g.

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e.g. 1

• T Where are they? What are they doing? What is
  the relationship between them?

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e.g. 2

• T What do you see in the picture? What is behind
  the trees? What is in the tree? What is in the
  river?

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• Another type of predicting task is to let
  students read the listening comprehension
  questions before they listen.

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Setting the scene

• The teacher can help provide the background
  information to activate learners schema, so they
  will be better prepared to understand what they
  hear.
• e.g. A passage about Michael Jackson

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Listening for the gist

• Listening for the gist is similar to skimming a
  passage in reading. The key is to ask students
  one or two questions that focus on the main idea
  or the tone or mood of the whole passage.
• Notice that students can answer the gist
  questions even though they do not understand
  every word or phrase in the passage.

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Listening for specific information

• There are situations in real life where we listen
  only for some specific details and ignore the
  rest of the entire message. e.g. weather
  forecast, announcements in train
  stations/airports
• It is important to expose our students to a
  variety of types of listening texts for a variety
  of purposes so that they will develop a variety
  of listening strategies to use for different
  situations.

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Summary on pre-listening activities

• We may use more than one kind of pre-listening
  activity
• Pre-listening tasks should not take much time
• The purpose of pre-listening activities is to
  activate the students schema, i.e. to provide
  context.

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While-listening activities

• The while-listening stage is the most difficult
  for the teacher to control, because this is where
  the students need to pay attention and process
  the information actively.
• Some tasks for while-listening activities

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No specific responses

• For stories, or anything that is interesting,
  humourous, or dramatic, we just have the students
  listen and enjoy it.

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Listen and tick
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Listen and sequence
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Listen and act

• Total Physical Response
• for beginners Stand up, Point to the
  
• for intermediate learners Pretend youre
  (doing something)

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Listen and fill

• It is important NOT to overdo this type of tasks,
  since it gives students the impression that they
  need to understand every word.
• We may ask the students to fill in the blanks
  with function words, say, prepositions.

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Listen and guess

• e.g.
• For height, appearance, and personalities
• Four clues about an animal

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Advantages of the above listening activities

• They personalize the lesson and make the
  listening interesting.
• They integrate listening with the other skills,
  especially speaking.

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Summary on while-listening activities

• Most of the time, it is helpful to provide a task
  for the students to do something while they are
  listening.
• By providing a variety of types of tasks,
  students learn to listen for a variety of
  purposes, which better prepares them for
  listening in the real world outside the
  classroom.

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Post-listening activities

• The post-listening stage is where the teacher can
  determine how well the students have understood
  what they listened to.
• One important point to keep in mind is whether we
  are testing the students listening comprehension
  or their memory.
• It is more common for people to understand more
  than they can remember.

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Some types of post-listening activities

• Multiple choice questions
• Answering questions
• Note-taking and gap-filling
• Dictogloss

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Multiple choice questions

• e.g. Compare Exercise A and Exercise B

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Answering questions

• Open-ended questions and inference questions can
  be asked.

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Note-taking and gap-filling

• for a summary of the text

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Dictogloss

• Preparation briefly talking about the topic and
  key words
• Dictation for two times, first time focusing on
  the meaning, and second time taking extensive
  notes
• Reconstruction working in pairs/groups,
  reconstructing the text
• Analysing and correction comparing their own
  version with the original

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Summary on post-listening activities

• Dont demand students to remember more details
  than a native-speaker would in a real-life
  situation
• Dont spend too much time giving students
  practise with traditional test-taking questions
• Integrate listening tasks with speaking and
  writing.

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Conclusion

• We must know the nature of listening, both in
  real language use and in language classrooms
• Focus on the process of listening rather than on
  the result of listening.
• Dont merely test the memory.