teaching to listen

HOW TO TEACH LISTENING

Arlenne M. Fernández

What is listening?• Little L2 research on the topic.• In Rost´s (2000) words “it is a

complex process that allows us to understand spoken language”.

• Comprehension for native speakers occurs subconsciously, but in ESL/EFL learners need to be “trained” by using strategies.


Notional-Functional

Teaching Listening

Listening as comprehension

Learner

Comprehension subskills

Listening as acquisition

Active process

Listener´s response

Lesson principles

Listener´s function

approaches

Top-down

Bottom-up

Listening strategies

Cognitive

Metacognitive


How important is to teach listening?• Listening is required in two of the conditions

mentioned before.• In Brown´s (2000) words “Listening is perhaps

one of the most important skills we have, yet it is one of the least recognized”.

• It is half of the communication process; adults spend 40-50% of their time listening, 25-30% speaking, 10-15% reading, less than 10% writing (Gilman & Moody,1984)

• Listening without understanding can be a source of demotivation that is why teachers need to think carefully in the type, purpose and difficulty of the task.


SKILL AURAL/SPEECH VISUAL/WRITTEN

RECEPTIVE Listening (and understanding)

Reading (and understanding)

PRODUCTIVE Speaking Writing

Conditions to learn a language

1) A learner who realizes the need to learn a second language and is motivated to do so.

2) Learner provided with access to the spoken language and the support (such as simplification, repetition, and feedback) they need for learning it.

3) A social setting (linguistic environment) which brings the learner in frequent enough and sustained contact with target language speakers.

Most cases of difficulty or failure of a learner, either

a child or an adult, to acquire a second language are

generally due to a lack in one or more of these factors.

(Wong-Fillmore, 1991)


Characteristics of spoken language affecting listening• Real life does not have a rewind

button.• For radio and interview speech events

lies within the range of 160 to 190 w.p.m

• The mean words for conversation is 210 w.p.m

• For lectures 140 w.p.mSpeech rate:• Lower intermediate understand at 127

w.p.m.• Intermediate understand at 124 w.p.m


• Listening is seen as an active process (not merely receptive) in which learner focus on selected aspects of oral discourse, construct meaning from passages, and relate what they hear to his previous knowledge.

• This active process is based on 6 listener functions (what listener attends to) and on 9 listener responses (how learner shows comprehension).

LISTENING AS AN ACTIVE PROCESS

Listening as Comprehension


• Listener Functions

– Identification: recognizing aspects of message (word categories, semantic clues).

– Orientation: finding important information (participants, tone, topic, etc.).

– Main idea comprehension.– Detail comprehension.– Full comprehension.– Replication (note that this is not

necessarily higher level, just different).

What listener attends toListening as Comprehension


• Listener Responses

– Doing: physical response (ie, TPR).– Choosing: matching, ordering sequences.– Transferring (modality): drawing, filling in.– Condensing: taking notes, making

outline, writing captions.– Extending: “going beyond”, new ending.– Duplicating: evidence of replication.– Modeling: imitation of features or text.– Conversion: interacting with text.

How Learner shows comprehension



LISTENING FOR COMPREHENSION• It is a traditional way of thinking about

the nature of the listening whose role is to facilitate the understanding of spoken discourse.

• There are two dimensions of processing listening comprehension which are bottom-up and top-down (Brown, 2000).



• Bottom-up process “The listener’s lexical and grammatical

competence in L2 provides the basis for bottom-up processing” (i.e The input is scanned for familiar words, and grammatical knowledge is used to work out the relationship between elements of sentences)

(Clark & Clark, 1975)



TASKS that use bottom-up process develop these skills in the learner:

• listening for specific details• recognizing cognates• recognizing word-order patterns



The kinds of TASKS that use bottom-up process:

• Identify the referents of pronouns in an utterance.

• Recognize the time reference of an utterance

• Distinguish between positive and negative statements.

• Recognize the order in which words occurred in an utterance.

• Identify sequence markers.• Identify key words that occurred in a

spoken text.• Identify which modal verbs occurred in a

spoken text.



Examples of TASKS that require a bottom-up

process:1) Students listen to positive and negative statements and choose an appropriate form of agreement.

Students hear Students choose the correct response-That’s a nice camera. Yes No-That’s not a very good one. Yes No-This coffee isn’t hot. Yes No-This meal is really tasty. Yes No



2) The following exercise practices listening for word stress as a marker of the information focus of a sentence:

Students hear Students check information focus -The bank’s downtown branch is closed today. Where When-Is the city office open on Sunday? Where When-I’m going to the museum today. Where When


We can illustrate an example. ImagineI said the following to you: “The guy I sat next to on the bus this

morning on the way to work was telling me he runs a Thai restaurant in Chinatown. Apparently, it’s very popular at the moment.”

• To understand this utterance using bottom-up processing, we have to mentally break it down into its components. This is referred to as “chunking.”



The chunks help us identify the underlying propositions the utterancesexpress, namely:• I was on the bus.• There was a guy next to me.• We talked.• He said he runs a Thai restaurant.• It’s in Chinatown.• It’s very popular now.


“The guy I sat next to on the bus this morning on the way to work was telling me he runs a Thai restaurant in Chinatown. Apparently, it’s very popular at the moment.”


Many traditional classroom listening TASKSfocus primarily on bottom-up processing, withexercises such as • dictation,• cloze listening, • the use of multiple choice• questions after a text, and similar activitiesthat require close and detailed recognition, and processing of the input. They assume that everything the listener needs to understand is contained in the input.


Following a Bottom-Up processing


Top-Down process

refers to the use of background knowledge (previous) in understanding the meaning

of a message. Unlike bottom-up processing

whichgoes from language to meaning, top-

down processing goes from meaning to

language.



• For example, consider how we might respond to the following utterance:

“I heard on the news there was a big earthquake in China last night.”

On recognizing the word earthquake, we generate a set of questions for which we want answers:• Where exactly was the earthquake?• How big was it?• Did it cause a lot of damage?• Were many people killed or injured?• What rescue efforts are under way?



• These questions guide us through the understanding of any subsequent

discourse thatwe hear, and they focus our listening on

what issaid in response to the questions.• However, top-down processing alone often provides insufficient basis for comprehension.


Following a Top-Down processing


The TASKS that use a top-down listening process involve:

• listening for the main idea• predicting• drawing inferences• summarizing



Tasks that require top-down processing develop

the learner’s ABILITY to do the following :

• Use key words to construct the schema of a discourse.

• Infer the setting for a text.• Infer the role of the participants and their

goals.• Infer causes or effects.• Infer unstated details of a situation.• Anticipate questions related to the topic

or situation.



• In real-world listening, both bottom-up and top-down processing generally occur together. • The extent to which one or the other dominatesdepends on the listener’s familiarity with the topic, the density of information in a text, the text type, and the listener’s purpose in listening. (e.g a cooklistening to a recipe)



General principles in teaching / learning listening comprehensionare:• Listening materials should be based on a wide range of

authentic texts, including both monologues and dialogues.• Schema-building tasks should precede listening.• Strategies for effective listening should be incorporated into

the materials.• Learners should be given opportunities to progressively

structure their listening by listening to a text several times and by working through increasingly challenging listening tasks.

• Learners should know what they are listening for and why.• Tasks should include opportunities for learners to play an

active role in their own learning.

Principles for a Lesson of Listening for comprehension



A typical LESSON in current teaching materials involves a three-part sequence consisting of pre-

listening,while-listening, and post-listening. And contains

activities that link bottom-up and top-down listening.

• The pre-listening phase prepares students for both top-down and bottom-up processing through activities involving activating prior knowledge, making predictions, and reviewing key vocabulary.

• The task-listening phase focuses on comprehension through exercises that require selective listening, gist listening, sequencing, etc.

• The post-listening phase typically involves a response to comprehension and may require students to give opinions about a topic.



• Cognitive strategies: Involve solving learning problems by considering how to store and retrieve information (Comprehension, Storing & memory; and Using & retrieval processes).

• Metacognitive strategies: Involve planning, monitoring and evaluating comprehension; better done at intermediate levels up (Planning, Monitoring and Evaluating)

TEACHING LISTENING STRATEGIES



Types of instruction of listening strategies

There are three levels of teaching strategies:

a)Blind (Sts do a task requiring use of a strategy but this is not identified, nor it´s labeled).

b)Informed (Sts are given a name for the strategy and told why it´s useful)

c) Controlled (Sts are provided opportunities to compare and evaluate their use of different strategies)



There are so many strategies. There are literally books full of them. One

approach is to choose a select number of strategies and to teach them

repeatedly:• Predicting what people are going to talk about.• Guessing at unknown words or phrases without panic.• Using one's own knowledge of the subject to help one understand.• Identifying relevant points; rejecting irrelevant information.• Retaining relevant points (by note-taking, summarizing,etc).• Recognizing discourse markers (e.g.,well, oh, now, finally,etc).• Recognizing cohesive devices, (e.g. linking words, pronouns, references, etc).• Understanding different intonation patterns and uses of stress, etc., which

give clues to meaning and social setting.• Understanding inferred information (e.g.speakers' attitude or intentions). (Willis,1981)

LEARNING LISTENING SUBSKILLS /MICROSKILLS


LISTENING FOR ACQUISITION• According to Krashen´s approach, the optimal goal

of L2 listening development is to allow for the L2 to be acquired through listening, not only to allow the learner to understand spoken messages in the L2.

• For language development to take place two conditions are necessary: noticing features of the input (what the learner hears) and trying to use new linguistic items in oral production in order to “incorporate” them into his / her language repertoire.

• In other words, learners need to take part in activities that require them to try out and experiment in using newly noticed language forms in order for new learning items to become incorporated into their linguistic repertoire (J.C Richards, 2008)

References• Brown, Steven. “Teaching Listening”. Cambridge University

Press, 2006.• “L2 acquisition: The role of listening”. Retrived on 07/16/10 http://www.latcomm.com/articles/l2listeningacquisition.html• Saricoban, Arif.”The teaching of listening”. The Internet TESL

Journal, Vol. V, No. 12, December 1999. http://iteslj.org/Articles/Saricoban-Listening.html• Richards, Jack C. “Teaching Listening and Speaking: from

theory to practice”. Cambridge University Press, 2008.• Rubin, Joan. “A review of Second Language Listening

Comprehension Research”. The Modern language Journal 78, 1994.

• Richards, Jack C. “Teaching Listening: from Comprehension to Acquisition”. Oxford University Press, 2008.

• Omaggio, Alice. “Teaching language in context: Proficiency-oriented instruction”. Boston Heinle & Heinle, 1986.

• Richards, Jack C. “Current trends in teaching Listening and Speaking”. Oxford University Press.July, 2003.

Let´s Exercise now!!!!


Taken from: Impact Listening 1 Unit 1.Pearson Longman

teaching to listen

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