listening · teaching listening 2. listening is a one-way process. •this is also based on a...

Teaching Listening

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Teaching Listening

Dr. John Trent

Associate Professor

Department of English Language Education

Email: [email protected]

Office: B4-2/F-04

Telephone: 2948 7375

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mailto:[email protected]

Teaching Listening

Introduction / Warm-up

Look through the partial script of a lesson for low-intermediate Ss.

After reading, find a partner and consider these questions:

• What do you think of the approach to listening taken by this teacher? What do you see as the

pros and cons of this lesson?

• Would you do anything differently and why?

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Teaching Listening

Because you don’t what to have to listen to me talking non-stop for 2 hours……

We are going to start with a quick pair / group work activity…..

So, can we please stay in pairs / small groups???

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Teaching Listening

Do you agree with these statements? Why / why not?

1. Listening is a passive skill.

2. Listening is a one-way process.

3. Listening and speaking are separate skills.

4. Listening practice should be based on native speaker models.

5. Learners should be able to understand everything in the text.

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Teaching Listening

1. Listening is a passive skill.

• This view suggests that information passes from sender to receiver.

• However, it is now thought that the listener gains meaning by interpreting messages in relation to the context.

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Teaching Listening

2. Listening is a one-way process.

• This is also based on a transmission view of information from speaker to listener.

• However, listening involves different kinds of roles.

• The listener might be in a communicative relationship with the speaker.

• Here, listening plays an important part in constructing the ongoing speech.

• Listening can be one-way (listening to a speech…)

• The purpose here is to listen for meaning.

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Teaching Listening

3. Listening and speaking are separate skills.

• In some courses, these skills are taught separately.

• “Today is the listening lesson”.

• Contemporary approaches to teaching aim to integrate skills to better reflect what occurs in communication outside the classroom.

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Teaching Listening

4. Listening practice should be based on native speaker models.

• Many learners and teachers believe they should aim for a native-speaker model.

• In many cases this is unrealistic.

• Not many learners will need native-speaker competency to communicate in English.

• Exposing students to activities that use a variety of different accents can be heard is now thought to be helpful in language learning.

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Teaching Listening

5. Learners should be able to understand everything in the text.

• This is unrealistic for classroom listening activities.

• In real life situations, we only pay attention / understand a relatively small percentage of what we hear.

• Contemporary approaches to teaching listening emphasize certain skills and contexts rather than expecting students to recall everything in a listening text.

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Teaching Listening

Some principles for teaching listening….

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K21mag4VnDI

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K21mag4VnDI








Teaching Listening

From the video…

• Bottom-up processing

• Top-down processing

• Will students be able to use background knowledge?

• What help will they need to access the text?

• Schema.

• Language-based processing.

• Meaning-based processing.

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Teaching Listening

From the video…

Implications for teaching listening:

• Not just teaching language-based processing.

• Activate background knowledge.

• Encourage Ss to guess, make predictions, to draw on their knowledge of the world…

• To enable them to listen as people do in authentic situations.

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Teaching Listening

To summarize…

Listening is complex……

Task

Think about this question:

What factors do you think come into play when we are trying to understand spoken language that might influence how successful we are?

Let’s start by looking at a few possibilities….

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Teaching Listening

Can you fill in some more under each of the categories below??

Listener factors

• What purpose does the listener have?

Linguistic factors

• What variety of English is the speaker using? (American, British, Singaporean, Indian?.....)

Situational factors

• Where is the communication taking place?

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Teaching Listening

Listener factors

• What purpose does the listener have?

• How proficient is he / she in English?

• How familiar is he / she with the topic?

• How interested is he / she in the topic?

• What strategies does he / she make use of while listening?

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Teaching Listening

Linguistic factors

• What varieties of English is the speaker using?

• How fast is the speaker speaking?

• How many speakers are there?

• What are their relationships to each other?

• How long is the spoken segment of language?

• What kind of discourse is involved (casual conversation, discussion, interview, lecture….)?

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Teaching Listening

Situational Factors

• Where is the communication taking place?

• Does the situation give clues about the content?

• How does the situation affect what people say to each other?

• What are the roles of the participants?

• What are they doing and why?

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Teaching Listening Developing students learning processes

Prepare students to listen in different kinds of situations. One thing we need to do is to prepare learners for different kinds of listening: • Casual conversations • Telephone conversations • Lectures • Classroom lessons • Movies • Songs • Announcements • Instructions……

The handout ( Number 1) summarizes some of the possibilities

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Teaching Listening Prepare students to listen in different kinds of

situations What can we do as teachers? • Examine activities in your textbook to see if the

tasks engage Ss in a variety of situations and roles.

• Many books do not do this. • They simply asks Ss to listen and report on

something. • We should not discard these but we can

supplement them with other activities.

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Teaching Listening

Prepare students to listen in different kinds of situations

For example, students could:

• Listen to recorded messages that give instructions and be asked to react to the instructions.

• Watch parts of a movie and discuss the main events.

• Find a favourite song on YouTube and listen to the words.

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Teaching Listening

Look through the textbook…

What listening situations are Ss asked to engage with?

Compare this with the list on the handout (1).

Is the coverage adequate?

If not, what could you do about it?

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Teaching Listening

Provide opportunities for Ss to use bottom-up processing

• As we saw in the video, listening is a process that makes use of different kinds of information.

• Some information comes from what the speaker says…the words and sentences spoken.

• Comprehension moves from the bottom (sounds, words, phrases…)

• To the top (meanings)

• Therefore, its called ‘bottom-up processing’.

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Teaching Listening


What does this process look like??

Imagine you heard this:

The guy I sat next to on the bus this morning on the way to work was telling me he runs an

Italian restaurant downtown. Apparently its very popular at the moment.

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Teaching Listening


To understand this using bottom-up processing, we break it down into components (called chunking).

So, we end up with something like this:

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Teaching Listening


The guy

I sat next to on the bus

This morning

was telling me

he runs an Italian restaurant downtown

apparently its very popular at the moment

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Teaching Listening


These chunks help me determine the meanings:

I was on the bus

There was someone next to me

We talked

He runs an Italian restaurant

Its downtown

Its very popular now.

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Teaching Listening


What can the teacher do?

• A transcript of a listening text can be used to show Ss how these types of boundaries of words occur.

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Teaching Listening


Use classroom activities that they begin from a general orientation…

and then move into listening for specific information.

Some examples are distributed in class: (Handout 2).

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Teaching Listening


Some examples for the classroom:

The following activities require intensive listening from Ss

Handout 3……

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Teaching Listening

Provide opportunities for Ss to use top-down processing

Top-down processing describes how the listener’s background knowledge affects listening.

From this, we can make predictions about the topic and what we are likely to hear.

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Teaching Listening


In this approach we refer to schemas.

These provide questions to which we expect to find answers in the text.

So, as the video suggested, if we mention “earthquake”, we might ask ourselves:

Where did it occur?

When did it occur?

How serious was it?.....

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Teaching Listening


When we apply our schema, top-down processing guides us towards the meaning.

For example, hearing the expressing “good luck” can have different meanings in different situations:

Going to the casino

Going to the dentist

Going to a job interview.

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Teaching Listening


What can the teacher do?

Using a textbook, ask:

• How much bottom-up and top-down processing is needed?

• Is the text on an unfamiliar topic for my Ss?

If yes, we can do several things:

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Teaching Listening


• Give Ss more processing time by stopping the recording at different places to give them more time to process information.

• Give Ss time to think about the topic in advance.

• Build / activate Ss schema through prediction and other pre-listening activities (which we will discuss later).

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Teaching Listening


• Ask Ss to brainstorm about a topic and / or generate a set of questions that they expect to hear answered.

As an example, look at the next handout (no. 4) for a suggested activity.

How does it allow Ss to practice top-down processing?

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Teaching Listening


Look at the next examples on Handout 5…

These activities also draw upon Ss background knowledge.

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Teaching Listening

Provide opportunities for Ss to use interactive processing: Moving between bottom-up and

top-down processing

Interactive processing refers to making use of bottom-up and top-down processing while listening.

In teaching, it is useful to use a cycle of activities with a text so Ss can practice both bottom-up and top-down processing.

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Teaching Listening


top-down processing

These activities should:

• Involve attention to word recognition skills.

• The use of background knowledge, inferencing, and predicting.

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Teaching Listening


top-down processing

Ss often believe that all listening texts should be processed bottom-up.

They often adopt a word-by-word listening strategy.

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Teaching Listening


top-down processing

Sometimes our teaching approach can reinforce this…..

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Teaching Listening


top-down processing

First, we play a passage…

Then, Ss answer a series of comprehension questions…

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Teaching Listening


top-down processing

To move beyond this, we need to make sure our listening materials and teaching approaches make use of different types of tasks.

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Teaching Listening


top-down processing

Tasks requiring the identification of explicit information can be followed by tasks that require…

Inferencing…

Prediction…

Or that draw upon Ss background information.

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Provide opportunities for Ss to use interactive processing: Moving between bottom-up and top-down processing

The handout (No. 6) has some examples of the type of activity that encourages Ss to use both types of processing.

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Provide opportunities for Ss to use interactive processing: Moving between bottom-up and top-down processing

Task

Look at the chapters from the listening text.

Are there opportunities for Ss to practice both types processing??

If not, how could you modify the listening activities?

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Activate Background Knowledge

The Pre-Listening Phase

Ss can be encouraged to apply their prior knowledge about things, concepts, people, and events to a particular utterance.

Then, the conversation Ss hear can be used to confirm expectations and fill in details.

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Content schemata:

• This refers to the knowledge we have about concepts, topics, and events.

For example:

• We have an understanding about that what happens when we book a table in a restaurant, what the effects of an earthquake might be….

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Formal schema:

• The knowledge we have of how different text types are constructed.

For example:

• How we expect a report to be organized and presented.

• If we know we are going to hear a personal recount of some event, we might pay attention for certain information…

• The time,

• place,

• Participants,

• events described in a chronological order…..

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What can we, as teachers, do?

• Activities that check, preview or structure learners background knowledge can be helpful.

• As an example, see the suggested activity on the handout (No. 7).

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Provide Necessary Vocabulary Support Research shows that providing Ss with vocab

support before and during listening can assit Ss in understanding texts….

For example:

At the pre-listening phase, the teacher can…

• Determine which words are central to the understanding of the text.

• Determine which words can be guessed from context.

• Determine which words can be ignored because they are not essential to understanding the meaning of the text.

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Provide Necessary Vocabulary Support • Words that you decide to preteach will often

be content words..

• These are necessary to understand the main ideas in the listening text.

• Make sure that preteaching does not turn into a lesson in itself!!

• It should be a relatively short segment….

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Provide Necessary Vocabulary Support An example of a vocabulary building activity is

on handout No. 8.

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Finding Good Listening Activities

What to look for Focus questions

Text demands

• Does the text place any special demands on the listener? (speed, accent, unfamiliar topic…).

• Is the text type familiar to your Ss?

Vocab knowledge

• Do your Ss have the appropriate level of vocab for the listening activity?

• Do aspects of vocabulary need preteaching?

Background knowledge

• Do your Ss have the necessary background knowledge to complete the listening activity?

Listening strategies

• Are there specific listening strategies that you could highlight for Ss before they listening (top-down / bottom-up processing….)

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While Listening: Address Ss difficulties There are a lot of factors that can lead to Ss misunderstanding meanings.

According to Field (2008) this can happen when a Ss:

• Does not know the word;

• Knows the written form but not the spoken form;

• Focuses on irrelevant information;

• Wrongly infers the meaning of a word from the context;

• Lack sufficient knowledge about the topic.

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While Listening: Address Ss difficulties What can teachers do?

Teachers can:

• Help Ss to monitor their responses to listening activities.

• This might involve a short questionnaire / class discussion.

• Ss can be asked to judge how much they understood,

• Whether they found the topic interesting;

• To identify areas in the listening text they found difficult.

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While Listening: Address Ss difficulties

What can teachers do?

By making Ss aware of some of the features of listening (speed, accent, vocab…),

They can be asked to rate the difficulty of a task.

For example, the activities on the handout (9) could be used to address common listening problems.

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Post-Listening: Using follow-up

Follow-up activities

• In authentic contexts, listening is usually not an end in itself.

• Listening can have different purposes…

• To entertain.

• To get information.

• To interpret conversation clues (for example, listening to questions or taking a turn at the

right moment in a conversation).

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• In the same way, classroom listening activities can be made more meaningful…

• For example, they can be linked to other activities as a follow-up.

• Ss can make use of the information they obtained from listening.

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• For example….

• Ss could complete an information sheet in the while-listening phase as they listen to a job interview.

• Post-listening, Ss could role-play a job interview based on the information they obtained.

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• The example on the handout (no. 10) shows one way in which listening can be combined with other skills.

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Post-Listening

Textbook Analysis

Are sufficient and appropriate follow up activities included in the textbook?

What are Ss asked to do?

What is your assessment of the follow-up activities? Are they appropriately linked to the listening activity?

If you were using this textbook, would you modify the follow-up activities in any way????

If yes, what would you do?

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More classroom activities

Again, we don’t need to use recorded materials that come with textbooks…

See the activities on the next handout (No 11).

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Reviewing some suggested activities

• Look through the four lesson outlines distributed in class (Handout 12).

• In small groups, select ONE for discussion.

• In terms of the different aspects of listening we discussed today, can you make a brief assessment of the activity.

• What do you think are the strengths and weaknesses of the lesson?

• Would you modify it in any way for use with your own students?

• If yes, what modifications would you make?

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Ways of Teaching Listening

Thank You…

Q & A

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listening · teaching listening 2. listening is a one-way process. •this is also based on a...

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